


Everybody Hates Zuko

by KeysmashJones



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: After the hundred year war, Aged-Up Character(s), Air Nomads (Avatar), Being the fire lord is really hard, Canon Compliant, Earth Kingdom (Avatar), Fire Nation (Avatar), Fire Nation Royal Family, Gen, Maiko mentioned in the background but it's past tense, POV Alternating, POV Third Person, Political Drama, Politics, Post-Canon, Toph is menace to society, Zuko just needs to be single and find himself, mailee, zuko and toph friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 34,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26554093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeysmashJones/pseuds/KeysmashJones
Summary: Running a country is hard. Especially when 90% of the people living there hate you. But Zuko’s not a quitter. He’ll make ends meet. After all, he’s got nothing left to lose.Set almost 10 years after ATLA. Canon-compliant to ALTA (mostly) but not the comics or LoK.
Relationships: Mai/Ty Lee (Avatar), Mai/Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko
Comments: 14
Kudos: 105





	1. Before, After, and in Between

**Author's Note:**

> So if you're reading my other story (The Dictator, the Journalist, and the Road to Democracy) you'll see a lot of similarities, including some recurring OCs. Unlike that one, this one is not a modern AU and it's also not a romance fic. But it's still a political drama POV alternating type of story with intermixed comic relief. If you liked my other work (even if you were in it for the romance!) I think you will like this one too. 
> 
> This is essentially my take on what happened after the Hundred Year War, told largely from Zuko's perspective but with help from his friends, old and new. Thank you so much for reading! Comments and kudos always welcome.

So Zuko had a mental breakdown. We’re not just talking about one of those nights marked by self-medication and a depressive spiral (although there were plenty of those too). We’re talking about the kind of event that divided his life in two, just like the Agni Kai. Everything in his life happened either before the Agni Kai, after the mental breakdown, or in between. And just like the last event that defined him, he would never be the same after it was over.

Before the breakdown, he was deceptively fine. He was the fire lord his friends and allies knew he could be: commanding authority and carrying himself with dignity. He had enemies, yes. Technically, no, he hadn’t partnered with the avatar _just_ to steal his father’s throne, but it certainly looked that way to someone who didn’t know any better. Still, he paid his skeptics no mind, and instead focused his energy on winning the respect of those who hadn’t yet made up their minds about him.

He inherited a council from his father, who in turn, inherited most of it from Fire Lord Azulon. This meant that it comprised mostly traditionalists, who, even if they didn’t outright oppose Zuko’s reign, adhered to convention. The problem was that in the Fire Nation, convention meant upholding the dangerous ideologies that justified the war. But this isn’t about the war. This is about Zuko.

Zuko was never trying to be radical. He never meant to rock the boat so hard. He only wanted to restore the honor of the Fire Nation, to reinstate its reputation as a cultivated people who could exist in polite society without declaring war or committing genocide. As simple as that goal might have sounded, he had one hundred years of history working against him. He needed to be the kind of leader who fit the part.

He grew out his hair, donned the royal headpiece, covered himself in flowing crimson robes, and gave the kinds of speeches that would have made his uncle proud. He talked of peace, justice, and a brighter future in which human life had value. It didn’t really matter what he said. It only mattered what people went away thinking.

In the beginning, he felt a lot like a child playing dress up. The throne felt too wide for his slim teenage frame. The crown felt too heavy for his head. He was just a boy bearing a grown-up title, and everyone knew it. But Zuko was convinced that if he played the part well and bided his time, people would come around. He would get older and more tenured in his position, and all reasons to doubt him would eventually fade away.

All he would need to pull it off was everything he’d ever been denied. Simple, right? He would need a visage both regal and imposing. He practiced his expressions in the mirror before the many important events that demanded his attention. His asymmetrical eyes blinked back at him. He would need the support of the common people, even if he couldn’t win over the stuffy nobles in court. The same common people either didn’t care enough to voice any opinion whatsoever, or else called him a usurper. Maybe this would be harder than he thought.

He tried to claim legitimacy in whatever way he could. He held his chin high as he ignored the whispers that followed him wherever he passed. He greeted his ministers with a friendly face, even when he knew they gossiped and snickered behind his back. He maintained his morals, even when they were repeatedly challenged by every politician he encountered. It wasn’t enough.

That particular day he was in the throne room. But then again, when wasn’t he? Everyday mirrored the last. He awoke before sunrise. He forgot to eat breakfast. He attended the morning council meeting. He took lunch in his office. By lunch, he meant tea. He attended the afternoon council meeting. That’s where he was now, right? Unless it was the morning still. He didn’t know. He couldn’t place if he’d had lunch already, since he never ate lunch anyway. Most pathetic of all was that it didn’t even matter. Everyday was the same and he never made an inch of progress anyway.

The voices around him, all too loud and talking over each other, stopped at once. He couldn’t hear a thing. That wasn’t a poetic way of saying he felt adrift in his own mind. He literally couldn’t hear anything, despite straining himself trying. He saw the lips of those around him moving, their eyes fixed expectantly on him. When they faded in and out of focus, only the glints of firelight against their eyes made them look alive.

His head throbbed. Maybe he should’ve eaten something. Would it be rude if he went to get a bowl of rice right now? Would it be odd to ask a servant to bring it to him in the middle of the meeting? Wait, now there were more people in the room. No, no there weren’t. They were only tricks of the light, ghostly duplications of the people who were actually present. Maybe it wasn’t the light tricking him, maybe it was his own eyes. It hurt to focus on anything for too long. Finally, a sound emerged from the silence. It was a buzzing noise that was somehow both high and low at once. He swore he could see the noise manifested in his blurry vision. It warped everything it touched and made his mind an unbearable place to be. It started faint, barely audible, until it was so loud that he gripped both sides of his head to get it to stop. When he buckled onto his knees, the noiseless crowd rushed toward him. He imagined they emitted a collective gasp, but all he heard was buzzing. He felt hands on his shoulders, prying him upwards. He saw the distorted faces of Minister Hansuke and a servant before he hit the floor.

When he awoke, he was staring at his bedroom ceiling, and he wasn’t surprised. Someone had carried him to his bed and laid him on his back with his hands folded placidly in front of him. It reminded him of his childhood, when he used to fall ill pretty often. Back then it was his mother who usually carried him to his bed, though sometimes it was his nanny Preeda. He used to be embarrassed by it, especially if his father or Azula had been there to witness it. He supposed he should’ve been embarrassed now. After all, he didn’t know who had carried him back to his chambers on this particular day. A palace servant? Minister Hansuke? That latter option was unequivocally shameful, especially since everyone in the throne room had watched, but Zuko couldn’t bring himself to worry about it. In fact, when Zuko paused to take inventory of his emotions, he realized that he felt… good. Really good.

Zuko had every reason to feel ashamed or afraid, didn’t he? The servants who arrived intermittently to check on him seemed to anticipate that he’d feel that way. He thanked them and accepted the tea and soup they brought him, but privately decided they didn’t need to treat him with such delicacy. 

His ears had stopped working. His eyes generated false duplicates of his coworkers. His conscious mind had failed him. That was undoubtedly frightening. So why did he feel so invigorated by the experience? Zuko dared to say he even liked it. He liked how real and alive he’d felt while it was happening. He liked having a priority laid out for him so plainly. It was a tangible, immediate problem, one that he could devote his whole attention towards. That was so unlike all of the other problems that plagued him. He felt the clarity that his life had been missing for so long.

For three days no one asked him to leave his chambers, so, for three days he stayed put. He felt well enough to leave, but why should he? The world outside his bedroom was so exhausting; he was reluctant to return until he absolutely had to. Still no one requested his presence on the fourth day, but Zuko decided to venture out on his own.

The sight of his fire lord regalia brought on a wave of nausea so potent Zuko swore it was more than psychosomatic. Still, he couldn’t spend another day in the same undergarments he’d worn for his entire sick leave, so he dressed in a set of his older, simpler clothes. He fixed his topknot, gathered a satchel of personal items, and paused at the doorway when the shining royal headpiece caught his eye. Someone had removed it from his hair when he’d fainted. Presumably that same someone had polished it and placed it neatly on his bedside table. It looked empty without a bundle of hair to prop it up. It looked like it was waiting for him. Feeling self-satisfied and a bit childish, Zuko swept it onto the floor and traipsed across it on his way out.

Minister Qin noticeably gave him a once over when he appeared at the threshold of the throne room. They weren’t used to seeing him this way, Zuko realized. (They also probably had no idea how long his fainting spell would keep him out of commission). Zuko had underestimated the strangeness of his sudden appearance to them. After all, Zuko saw himself at all occasions, at any hour of the day, throughout his life. He was used to himself in various states of disarray. He was realizing now that none of these people did. They only saw Zuko the fire lord, and that was barely him at all.

“Your Majesty?” Qin prompted. He let the silent question behind his question hang in the air.

Zuko didn’t answer. He just surveyed them all, daring them to survey him in return.

“My Lord, we were discussing the standardized curriculum for the Calderan academies. Do you care to weigh in?” Minister Yat-Sen offered, seemingly sincere. Yat-Sen never hated Zuko, he was just too senile to be his ally.

Zuko passed his gaze over all of them, one at a time. His eyes passed over each face, lingering on it to the point that its owner became visibly uneasy. Good.

“No. No, I don’t. I don’t care at all.”

And then he left. No one tried to stop him. 

\---------

Anyone who knew Zuko before his coronation knew he could be volatile. That’s why none of them had been worried at first. He’d come back, they all assumed. This was just one of his phases, the little rebellions he needed to commit every so often in order to feel properly heard. Well, they heard him, alright. They just didn’t care.

His ministers and staff congregated in the halls, imagining where he might have gone and what he might’ve been doing.

“Probably went to stay with his uncle for a while,” Qin hypothesized.

“I bet he thinks we’re all worried about him. No! Even better: I bet he thinks we actually miss him,” Hansuke jested the absent Zuko who couldn’t defend himself. A chorus of laughter echoed up the throne room’s vaulted ceiling.

But making jokes at the expense of their moody young leader could only offer so much entertainment, and when that ran dry, they returned to business as usual. Their meetings were remarkably unchanged. Their duties never required much of Zuko’s input either. Sometimes they caught themselves picturing Zuko still hiding up in his bedroom, as he had been before his melodramatic exit. Maybe he was. Everyone assumed that someone else had already checked.

On the fourth day of Zuko’s absence, when most of the palace staff had exhausted their conjectures on his whereabouts, heedless old Yat-Sen asked if anyone else had noticed that the fire lord had gone missing.

“He might actually be dead,” Hansuke proclaimed several weeks into Zuko’s disappearance. Hardly anyone had spoken of Zuko since the initial few days after he left. They hadn’t thought about him very much either. But no one had to ask Hansuke who he was talking about.

_What if he was dead?_ They all wondered. The only person in the palace who might actually miss him was Preeda, but still, that didn’t mean that the rest of them wanted Zuko to die.

After an extended lull, the gossip sparked up again, this time about Zuko’s alleged death. If he was dead, how had it happened? Everyone offered up a different theory. Some suspected he’d done it himself, and his strange behavior before his disappearance was the final warning that he’d snapped. Others speculated that something he encountered on his travels had killed him. Whether that something was human or beast, they didn’t know.

“If someone murdered him, we would have heard about it by now,” Preeda assured them, and also possibly herself, while chewing gingerly on her thumbnail.

“He’s not exactly street smart. A highwayman could have robbed and killed him without realizing who it was,” Jong, the palace chef, considered.

“He’s got more street smarts than you think,” Jee, a member of the palace guard, countered. He leaned back in his chair and spoke with more authority than the rest, who were simply peddling rumors. Everyone took a moment to remind themselves that Jee had been the lieutenant on Zuko’s ship during his banishment.

A hush fell over the group. One of the scullery maids finally broke it. “And we’ve all seen what his face looks like. Even if he was murdered, someone would find and recognize the body. The news would break eventually.”

So he probably wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere. That didn’t mean he hadn’t died by some other means. And it certainly didn’t mean he was coming back. But where would he go? How could someone so famous and so recognizable ever hope to begin anew? There had to be someone who knew more than they let on.

Letters were sent to everyone with even the most tenuous connection to Zuko’s social circle. All of the connections were tenuous, in fact. When the palace staff put their brains together to compile a list, they realized Zuko didn’t associate with anyone. He had old friends, yes, dating back to the end of the war, namely the avatar and the friends they shared. He had even older friends, people he’d known as children. There was Mai, Ty Lee, and several others he’d known from the royal academy. The only family he had left was his uncle.

Iroh didn’t know anything. Upon receipt of his letter, he was so concerned that he put his assistant manager in charge of the teashop and returned to the palace at once. Not that it helped.

The avatar didn’t know anything either. He passed along the word to the mutual friends he shared with Zuko, but that, too, amounted to nothing. Neither of the Water Tribe siblings had a clue, and apparently no one had heard from the blind earthbender since before Zuko vanished. Mai and Ty Lee were both dead ends.

After fruitlessly searching Zuko’s social network, the conversations surrounding him changed their tone. It was no longer any fun to imagine Zuko escaping to some tropical island somewhere, or starting a new life as a chicken pig farmer. With all the search efforts having failed, speculating Zuko’s whereabouts had become depressing. People stopped asking if he was dead or how it might’ve happened. They simply accepted it and moved on. The fire lord was gone. The whys and hows no longer mattered.

From that point on the questions grew less fanciful and more practical. Zuko had died, or well, _disappeared_ , unmarried and childless. In the absence of any clear heir, who was to take his place on the throne? The fire sages grumbled and lamented their dilemma. They’d urged him to get married for years. They pushed him to hurry up and have children. He didn’t listen, but it hadn’t seemed like such an insurmountable problem then. He was young, and mostly healthy, and so it seemed unlikely that anything would happen to him. And then something did.

For the time being, Iroh served as interim fire lord. With each new day that came and went sans Zuko, the fire sages begged Iroh to allow himself to be properly crowned. What was he waiting for?

“There’s no sense saving your seat for a dead man!” the sages hissed at him. Iroh averted his eyes and deepened his frown.

The fire sages wanted to officially declare him dead. The entire palace agreed it was for the best. Only Iroh gave them any resistance, and after a while, even he couldn’t deny what seemed obvious.

“You let him leave! You watched it happen!” Iroh howled, jabbing an accusatory finger at Zuko’s ministers who had been present on the day he vanished.

“Your Majesty, how could we have known? He was a grown man. We had no right to stop him!” Minister Qin argued. Deep down, Iroh knew he was right. He just wanted someone to blame.

The announcement was made to the public six months after Zuko had last been seen. The fire lord was presumed dead in the eighth year of his reign. He was only twenty-five years old.

“We have no ashes to fill the urn,” Iroh noted somberly when funeral arrangements were underway.

“We could burn a collection of his personal belongings and fill the urn with those instead,” Preeda offered. It was what they had done for the late Prince Lu Ten, but she didn’t point this out. She didn’t need to.

Iroh didn’t reply. She took his silence to be more or less affirmative.

There was a ceremony. The people weren’t quite shocked. While palace staff had been upholding a vague and flimsy explanation for their leader’s complete lack of public appearances, the people hung onto their suspicions.

Rumors abounded all over again, and this time no one had to relegate their theories to hushed, late-night conversations with their close friends and family. Any given market, restaurant, or shop in the Fire Nation buzzed with its patrons' theories on what might’ve been the young fire lord’s final fate. The most popular theory, which was non-coincidentally also the most sordid, was that he’d been murdered by one of his most trusted cohorts.

“It was that Hansuke guy, I just know it! Thought he could grab the throne for himself!”

“Why would Minister Hansuke murder the fire lord? General Iroh just took the throne anyway.”

“You don’t think the old general did it, do you?”

“No, but he better watch his back. With Hansuke still around, who knows what could happen…”

Others thought it was Minister Qin. Some of the more insane theories accused Toph, based only on the fact that she knew Zuko and also hadn’t been seen in a while. Her name was mostly cleared when her parents confirmed that she made a habit of wandering off without telling anyone, and there was nothing suspicious about it. A lesser-known theory pinned the blame on Governor Ukano.

“The governor’s own daughter was the fire lord's wife once. He hoped he could make a claim based on that!”

“That’s absurd!”

It was absurd, and palace security must have agreed, because no arrests were made. Iroh, more than anyone, thought it was absurd. To him, this whole situation was utterly ridiculous, and that was because he believed with all his heart that Zuko wasn’t dead.

As the royal headpiece slid into Iroh’s topknot and he gazed out at the crowd gathered outside the palace, he offered a silent plea.

_Come home, nephew._

Zuko, miles away and very much alive, couldn’t hear him.


	2. Clean Slates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So if Zuko's not dead, then where the heck is he??

The Fire Nation palace was situated within the nation’s capital city. The city was nestled in the caldera of a dormant volcano. That dormant volcano was three hundred and eighty-two miles from the nearest major city, and in between the two was a vast expanse of lush rainforest. Small towns dotted the surrounding area here and there, but mostly, the area was wild and devoid of people.

Through the jungle snaked a river, and along that river there was a riverbank. On that riverbank there was a campfire. Its orange flames had since gone out, leaving a disorderly pile of glowing charcoal enclosed in a pit of sandy mud. A set of footprints could be traced from the campfire to a lean-to shelter in the edges of the jungle. In that lean-to, picking the skeleton of a fish for the last of its meat, was Zuko.

“Oh hey Zuko,” said a voice.

Zuko wasn’t proud to admit that he’d screamed. He jumped to his feet, striking a basic firebending pose, and aimed his fist in the direction of the voice. The only problem was that he had no idea which direction the voice came from. He scanned the area frantically, pivoting every time he thought he heard or saw something.

When he’d just about convinced himself the voice had been an auditory hallucination, Toph emerged from the brush in front of him. 

“Relaaax, it’s only me.”

He blinked at her. He rubbed his eyes, half expecting her to disappear when he opened them again. She didn’t.

He lowered the fist that had been poised to strike. “Toph? What are you doing here…?”

What was anyone doing here? Zuko hadn’t seen or heard another human being in, well, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been gone. That was kind of the point. He needed to distance himself from everything and everyone in order to reboot his mind. Almost nine years of ruling the Fire Nation had convinced him that calendars and schedules were enemies of his mental health. He needed to lose himself in the untamed wilderness.

Toph strode into his campsite and began digging through his meager belongings. She plucked a mango from his rations and took a large bite from it. The juice dribbled from her chin and ran down her forearm, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What are  _ you _ doing here?” She retorted after a while.

“I—I asked you first!” Zuko stammered. Of all the people he could have encountered in the Fire Nation jungle, of course it was Toph. Stubborn, cryptic, moody Toph.

She showed no intention of answering his question. She continued poking around in the lean-to, and when she grew bored of that, sprawled out on the makeshift bedroll Zuko had woven for himself.

Zuko, still not fully convinced this was real, resigned himself to defeat. He’d never out-Toph Toph.

“I needed some time away from people. I needed to clear my head, set my priorities straight,” he confessed. Toph emitted a sympathetic “mmmph.”

“You know everyone thinks you’re dead, right?”

What? Why would people jump to such a conclusion? He hadn’t been gone that long. He told Toph this, and she shrugged.

“I’m just telling you what I know. It’s been like six months, and everybody’s freaking out. I guess they had a funeral and everything.”

Six months… Surely it hadn’t been that long.

“So,” Zuko managed, not entirely sure what he was trying to articulate. Finally a coherent question bubbled to the forefront of his mind. “So did you think I was dead too?”

“I wondered. It seemed like a real possibility. But I also know that you like to run off on mysterious adventures to find yourself or whatever.” 

Zuko took umbrage to this, but he couldn’t decide if it was because she’d correctly guessed what he was doing, or because she didn’t seem the least bit sad that he was purportedly dead.

“So you came out here… to look for me? How did you know?”

She cackled.

“Oh, I didn’t. Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are.” She didn’t look surprised. She looked completely at ease.

“Then what are you doing here?” Zuko demanded again. His patience was waning, and the novelty of finding a surprise Toph in the remote jungle was wearing thin too.

For the first time in their entire exchange, Toph looked uncomfortable. When she spoke, she angled her head away from him. “I ran into some trouble, okay? I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Trouble with the law?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it!”

And so their conversation had reached a dead end. Zuko knew better than to push Toph when she didn’t want to be pushed. He settled cross-legged beside the bedroll and began sharpening a spear he’d started several days earlier. Toph didn’t budge.

They stayed like that, suspended in a silence that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, until Toph bolted upright. Her milky eyes glittered with excitement.

“I know! We could go back to the Caldera together, and you can grant me an international pardon.”

Zuko winced. What had she done that was so bad that she needed to be pardoned? Toph chattered on.

“I mean, you are the fire lord, after all. Well technically you’re not anymore, since they all think you’re dead and gave the position away to your uncle, but I’m sure they’ll give it back when you show up and they all see that you’re alive!”

“Uncle’s the fire lord?!” It should have occurred to him that the sages would waste no time replacing a supposedly dead ruler, but he just never thought about who…

Toph waved a dismissive hand. “Duh. They’re not going to pull your father out of prison. Or better yet, take your sister out of the loony bin.” She chortled at her own joke. Zuko scowled.

“Yeah, we all know my family is really screwed up. Thanks for the reminder. So why do you need a pardon? What did you do?” He fixed her with a glare. It didn’t occur to him that she couldn’t see it.

“Nothing! Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t even affect y—”

“If you’re asking me to grant you a pardon then it affects me quite a bit. What did you do?”

“It wasn’t even that ba—”

“Did you kill someone?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

Toph was quiet for a long moment. She had her palm to the ground, like she was trying to gauge whether Zuko was prepared for a fight. 

She sighed and lowered her head. “I needed money, okay? I made some bad friends. I did some things I shouldn’t have.”

“Why would you need money? Your family is almost as rich as I am. Richer, if you consider that they’re not obligated to spend their fortune on the wellbeing of the general public.”

“I know all that!” She paused, simmering down a little. “They cut me off. Took me out of the will, too. The family fortune is only worth anything if you’re still family.”

Zuko wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t that. He was no stranger to the conditional love that wealthy parents tended to offer their children.

“Toph, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know…”

“Yeah, well. How could you? I didn’t tell you until right now. Besides, I don’t even care that much. It’s not like I miss them,” she spat, and crossed her arms in front of her chest for emphasis. “It wouldn’t have even bothered me if I didn’t need the funding.”

“So what did you do about it?” Zuko asked. And he was really asking this time, not accusing.

Toph threw her hands up in a defensive gesture. “It’s not like I have any marketable skills! I can’t read, and if it doesn’t require reading then it doesn’t pay shit. That is, if it’s legitimate.”

“Well, what about those earthbending tournaments you used to do? You’d win prizes for that kind of thing, right?” Zuko hadn’t been there, but he’d heard the story about how Toph encountered the rest of the gaang. Sure, the ring made money off illegal betting, but it was a relatively victimless crime.

“Yeah, that was my first thought too. I found out Earth Rumble VI got shut down a few years ago. I figured there had to be other underground rings, and so I set about finding them. And that’s when I met my new ‘friends.’ They assured me their trade was more lucrative than earthbending ever could be. I followed them to Ba Sing Se.” 

“And their trade was…” Zuko prodded, even though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Let’s just say Ba Sing Se has a pretty bad opium problem. Except for some people it’s not a problem at all.”

Zuko released a sigh. The number of times he’d heard Earth King Kuei grumbling about getting a handle on the city’s opium abuse was more than he could count.

“So you really didn’t murder anyone?”

“No! Broke a few legs, sure, but that’s just the business.”

“…Then I’ll do it. I’ll pardon you, and you can take refuge in the Fire Nation.”

Toph grinned that Toph grin of hers.

\---------------

Trekking through the rainforest with a master earthbender was significantly easier than going it alone. Zuko hadn’t the foresight to bring a machete, since he wasn’t sure where he would end up. Early in his journey, he’d attempted to burn his way through the dense foliage, but found that it was just too wet to have any effect.

Toph was able to summon massive sheets of rock that sliced through the plant life effortlessly. She also had a much better sense of direction. Zuko had deliberately not kept track of where he was going in an effort to evade his conscious thoughts, and it worked fine as long as he didn’t need to be anywhere in particular. But now that he and Toph were headed back to the Caldera, Zuko was more than happy to allow her to navigate. He had a suspicion he’d spent the last six months walking in circles anyhow.

Zuko missed Toph, he realized. She wasn’t fussy or pretentious, and she didn’t spoil their contented silences with meaningless small talk. As long as Zuko simply let her be, she extended him the same courtesy. Truthfully, Zuko had been apprehensive about having a travel partner after having spent so much time alone. He’d been worried for nothing, as Toph was really the ideal travel partner. She was honest and uncomplicated. Zuko respected that.

“Hey, I guess you finally got your field trip,” Zuko blurted one day. They’d been walking quietly for several hours, and Zuko couldn’t be sure why he felt the need to interrupt it.

“Huh?” Toph replied, preoccupied with moving a cluster of vines out of their path.

“Remember? During the war? Everybody else got to go on a life-changing field with me except you? Well now you finally got one.”

Toph released a snort-laugh. “Oh yeah. I guess I did.”

They settled back into silence after that.

Zuko didn’t just miss Toph. Being in her presence made him realize that he missed everyone, and that he’d been ignoring them for the past few years. He supposed he ignored them  _ because  _ he missed them. He missed how they made him feel, and he was afraid he’d never feel that way again. So pushed them away before they could do it first.

It wasn’t a pleasant epiphany to have, but then again, this was the kind of personal growth that a life-changing field trip should entail, wasn’t it? The new Zuko probably shouldn’t ignore his friends anymore.

“Hey Toph?”

She grunted as she levitated a boulder off the ground. “Yeah?”

“Why did your parents cut you out of the will?”

She dropped the boulder. It tumbled down the rock face, and Zuko silently thanked the spirits that they were the only people around for miles. The trees that had the misfortune to be in its path made a horrible cracking sound.

“Does it really matter?” She snapped.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I just thought I might understand what you’re going through. Parents are hard.”

Toph exhaled. “Yeah. Parents are hard. ...They wanted me to get married.”

Zuko made an effort not to react to that. Anyone who met Lao and Poppy Beifong’s standards was undoubtedly a pompous ass.

“And you didn’t love him?” Him, right? Was Toph even straight? If the match had been arranged by her parents, it had to be a man.

“No. Well yeah, obviously. But that wasn’t even the issue. The issue was just,” she gestured vaguely, “all of it.”

“All of, what?”

“The life they wanted for me. The guy was alright, I guess, if not kinda boring. But that was the problem. Everything was boring. They wanted me to be this proper lady of high society or something. They wouldn’t shut up about how they wanted grandkids.”

“I thought,” Zuko began, carefully. He didn’t know very much about Toph’s personal life, and he didn’t want to say something tactless. “I thought you and your parents reached an understanding after the war ended.”

“Yeah, I thought so too!” She exclaimed, consolidating a swath of loose gravel into a usable footpath. “And for a while, everything seemed to be okay. Better than okay. They seemed to be alright with my hobbies and interests. But then I started getting older, and they made it clear that my lifestyle was only acceptable for a little kid and not a grown woman. To them, my earthbending was nothing more than a tomboy phase that they expected me to grow out of.

“They were honestly stunned when I took issue with it, too. Like, they really had no idea that I didn’t want to enter into some stuffy arranged marriage and quit earthbending. I was just as shocked as they were. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to think they actually understood me.”

Zuko chewed on that. He didn’t know what to say. Luckily Toph wasn’t offended by it.

She continued, “We had this huge blowout argument, and they gave me an ultimatum. Either I decided ‘it was time to grow up,’ or they would cut me out of the fortune. They thought for sure that they had me. They assumed I had no other means of making money. They were kind of right, I guess, but whatever. They don’t need to know what I’m up to these days. I’d rather go to jail than go back to Gaoling.”

Neither one spoke for several minutes. Zuko didn’t know how to help her. He had experience removing toxic family members from his life, but he thought better of encouraging Toph to do it. Maybe she wanted to salvage their relationship. It wasn’t his place to declare that her parents were a lost cause.

“Hey Toph?” he said finally.

“Yeah?”

“Do you need a job?”

She stopped what she was doing and gave him a smile that was disarmingly sincere.

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

\--------------

After two weeks of travelling, they had reached the jungle’s edge. According to Toph, they were only a few hour’s walk from the town of Wan Khiao, and from there they would intersect with a road that led to the Caldera. After a six-month-long absence from society, Zuko was only a few days away from being home.

Zuko had been nervous about refilling their supplies in Wan Khiao, but at Toph’s insistence, he accompanied her to the town square. He waited for someone to recognize him. By now he was familiar with people’s reactions when they realized they were in the presence of royalty, and he didn’t want to imagine how magnified it would be now that Zuko had been pronounced dead.

Bewilderingly, those reactions never came. People passed him on the streets, looking him directly in the face, and didn’t even flinch.

“I thought you said I was pronounced dead!” Zuko hissed at Toph in a low voice. “Why hasn’t anyone said anything about me?”

“Listen, I don’t have the expertise of you seeing-people, but I’m guessing six months in the jungle did a real number on your fire lordly appearance,” Toph whispered back.

Zuko drew a hand up to his face, where his fingertips greeted a bushy, unkempt beard. His hair was probably just as much of a mess. He’d quit trying to bully it into its usual topknot months ago, opting instead to pull it back into a loose approximation of a ponytail at the base of his neck. Now that he was taking stock of his appearance, he realized he must’ve lost a lot of weight, too. It’s not that he couldn’t have anticipated this, given how he’d spent the past six months, but, well, he just hadn’t thought about it.

He was more likely to be mistaken for a vagabond than the presumed-dead fire lord. He couldn’t decide how he felt about that, so he chose to just revel in the anonymity.

When they were done shopping, he and Toph shared their first proper meal in months. They slurped noodles and shovelled rice into their mouths with the gusto of someone who’d nearly starved to death. They even splurged on some hot sake.

“To clean slates,” Toph offered, hovering her ceramic cup within his reach. A wavering pillar of steam issued from its rim.

“To clean slates,” he agreed, clinking his cup against hers.

They hit the road again not long afterwards. The days that followed felt somehow longer than Zuko’s entire extended stay in the jungle. Eventually they came to a clearing from which he could see the Caldera on the horizon.

“You ready?” Toph asked.

“No,” Zuko replied.

And so they made their way into the city.


	3. Four Fire Lords and a Funeral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> War Minister Qin does some reflecting on Zuko's absence.

War Minister Qin was on his fourth fire lord, and he had no idea how to feel about it. He expected to survive two, at least. Fire Lord Azulon hadn’t been especially young when he’d appointed Qin, and Qin still had plenty of good years left at that point. He still did, in fact. Maybe he’d live to see fire lord number five.

If you’d asked him years ago, he didn’t think it was all that likely he’d see more than two. Azulon, an old man, did what all old men eventually do, thereby paving the way for his successor. Sure, Qin thought that successor would be Iroh and not Ozai. Lu Ten’s death had sent a shockwave through the royal court, but Qin never expected it to change the order of succession. Qin knew Lu Ten, though not well. By all accounts he was a capable young man with a bright future. He was well liked, too. At his funeral, his buddies from the army shared stories of his humor and wit. It was a shame. If Qin ever thought he’d live to see three fire lords, he’d have been honored to serve Lu Ten.

Even with Lu Ten out of the picture, no one could have predicted whatever clandestine chain of events led to the nation bowing down before Fire Lord Ozai. Qin was smart enough to know that Ozai had been a bit of a nut job. His nuttiness favored the rapid development of military technology, however, so Qin swallowed his objections and just enjoyed the free reign Ozai afforded him. Still, Qin never fully respected him. After having completed several campaigns in the northern Earth Kingdom, Qin had trouble respecting any authority figure without a proper military background. But he was a damned good actor.

That acting came in handy when Zuko was crowned. Qin’s first notable memory of Zuko was formed when he was given a third-row seat at the Agni Kai that led to Zuko’s banishment. Qin always regarded him as a nice kid with a lot of issues. Too nice to be an effective leader, and with too many issues to offer his nation any stability. Zuko therefore surprised everyone when his reign proved to be the blandest of all those Qin had lived through. His banishment and the subsequent end of the war must’ve frightened him out of having any real backbone. He followed rules religiously, and when Qin had made a half-hearted effort to get to know him, he could have sworn the then-teenaged ruler went out of his way to behave like a bowl of unseasoned jook. 

Now, Iroh was a leader Qin could respect. He was a decorated veteran with a healthy appreciation for all that the military did for the Fire Nation, but he was old enough to be level headed about it. Qin had always felt somewhat cheated out of the opportunity to serve Iroh as a fire lord, and now, as fate would have it, that opportunity had returned. Iroh might have been the dynamic leader Qin always imagined, too, if he hadn’t been so distracted grieving his late nephew.

Sorry,  _ missing _ nephew. That was the terminology they’d all been instructed to use in their new fire lord’s presence. There was still a chance Zuko would turn up one day. That’s what they told each other so it wouldn’t sound quite so hollow when they parroted it back at Iroh. But honestly, it was just a matter of time. No one wanders off for months at a time and then returns to tell the tale. He was dead in a ditch somewhere, and no one was brave enough to say it to the old general’s tear-streaked face.

Qin hadn’t especially liked Zuko, but he hadn’t wanted him to meet such a tragic end either. At some point Qin just had to resign himself to the belief that the royal bloodline was cursed.

As tradition dictated, Zuko’s funeral was also Iroh’s coronation. They could lie to themselves as much as they liked about how conjoining the two events symbolized the cyclical nature of birth and death, or whatever, but really it was just easier. The Fire Nation was nothing if not ruthlessly efficient.

Iroh dropped his gaze when Zuko’s coffin was set alight, even though everyone knew it was empty. Qin had flashbacks of Iroh averting his eyes the moment Zuko received his infamous scar, when everyone else dared to look on.

Even with the specter of Zuko’s mysterious disappearance looming over the last few months, Qin suspected there was an opportunity for him in all of this. He intended to capitalize on it, too, if he could only find the right time to bring it up. How does one broach a subject like that, or any subject, really, to a man mourning the loss of a nephew who might as well have been a son to him, after his real son also died at a tragically young age?

The truth is that Zuko had squandered Qin’s talents. It felt treasonous to admit that now, in light of, er, recent events, but it was just true. He’d all but dismantled the military in careful observance of the Treaty of Caldera City, and he’d let his fanatical adherence to the rules blind him to reason. Because he tiptoed around the treaty so delicately, he expected that everyone else had done the same, and he refused to hear it when Qin informed him otherwise.

There was no question that the authors of the treaty saw the Fire Nation as the aggressor and gutted its military accordingly, but that’s not to say that the treaty didn’t demand sacrifices of the other nations as well. The Earth Kingdom, for example, was instructed to dramatically reduce the capacity of the Dai Li. You know, the creepy domestic police force that brainwashed its own citizens in a secret bunker under a lake? The authors of the treaty decided that  _ that _ shit needed to go.

The only problem was that they hadn’t done it. They pretended to, and because the Earth Kingdom was viewed as a victim of the Hundred Year War, no one bothered to investigate. Qin had intelligence from only somewhat legal sources that led him to believe the Earth King thought obeying the terms of the treaty was beneath him.

When he tried to tell Zuko, he refused to hear of it.

“Of course they got rid of the Dai Li’s reeducation centers, it’s in the treaty!” Zuko argued.

Qin, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration, had retorted, “My Lord, I know it’s written in the treaty. That doesn’t mean they followed the orders given by the treaty!”

“They have to! It’s what the treaty is for!”

If Zuko’s world were real, it would have been a rosy place indeed.

Whatever. Qin knew that the end of the war didn’t mean the end of their problems. If Zuko refused to plan for the worst, Qin would just have to do it in secret.

But now, with a leader like Iroh at the nation’s helm, a leader who knew what it meant to command an army, a leader who truly understood the vital role of the military, just maybe Qin didn’t have to operate in secret anymore. It’s not like Qin was building weapons for offensive purposes. It’s just that they had the technology, and with the Earth Kingdom refusing to play by the rules, who knew when something like that would be called for? 

“Your Majesty?” Qin ventured, standing respectfully outside the threshold of Iroh’s, formerly Zuko’s, office. 

The general, whose eyes were both bloodshot and watery, waved him in. 

“Are you alright, sir?” Qin asked, as if he didn’t already know. 

“Perhaps not yet, but I will recover. What was it that you wanted to talk about?” 

Qin spied a portrait of the late Fire Lord Zuko on the desk beside a mountain of unread paperwork. Had Iroh really been in here, alone and crying over a portrait, all this time after Zuko vanished? 

“Ah, nothing, sir. I was going to ask you a question about the quarterly financials, but I realized I have the answer in my notes. Sorry to bother you.” 

Okay, so maybe Qin would have to wait a bit longer than he anticipated. 

Qin had been in the process of contemplating exactly that when he collided with Minister Hansuke. 

“Ahg! Watch where you’re—” Qin grumbled, as the stack of scrolls he’d had in tow rolled across the polished floor. He hadn’t had the chance to finish his sentence when he realized that Hansuke had barely even heard him. “Hansuke?” 

Now that he took the time to absorb his surroundings, Qin saw that Hansuke wasn’t the only idiot standing slack-jawed in one of the most heavily trafficked hallways in the palace. A throng had gathered: servants, ministers, and nobility alike. Their sheer numbers blocked Qin’s view of whatever had attracted them. 

“You, girl!” Qin barked, grabbing one of the palace cooks by her shoulder. “I demand to know what this is about!” 

The girl stuttered under his scrutiny. “I-it’s… he’s back.” 

“Who? Who’s back?” 

When no one could provide a coherent answer, Qin had no choice but to elbow his way through the crowd until he could see for himself. There, at the locus of the chaos, stood Zuko. 

An almost unrecognizably scruffy, but very much alive Zuko. 


	4. It’s Just Jian, Thank You Very Much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day in the life of a young woman living in the post-war Caldera.

“Jianling!” Jian’s mother’s hands seized her shoulders before she’d even stepped through the doorway. 

“Um, yeah, hi. My day was great, thanks for asking,” Jian straightened out her tunic after prying herself away from her mother. Her mother took no notice, tugging her by the arm instead. 

“Go to your room and make yourself presentable. Hurry!” 

“Do I not look presentable already…?” Jian’s mother made no reply, and instead fussed with Jian’s hair like she hadn’t even heard. Jian swatted her hands away. “Wait! Can I unpack my bag first?”

“There’s no time! Go put on your nicest hanfu. Go!” She commanded. Jian stumbled into her bedroom, propelled by the light (okay, not so light) shove her mother gave her. 

Jian suppressed the plethora of questions bouncing around in her mind and did as instructed. When she emerged minutes later, looking more or less the same with nicer clothes, she found her mother lurking at the door, ready to strike. 

“No glasses!” Her mother commanded, ripping the golden-rimmed spectacles from her face. 

“I can’t see!” Jian protested, but her mother guided her to a cushion in the living room. 

“You don’t need to see. Now sit.” Jian did. “No, not like that! Sit like a lady.” Jian sighed, uncrossed her legs, and settled into a kneeling position. 

Jian thought she could make out the blur that was her mother hauling another, smaller blur, which was probably a teapot. The blur came into focus as it was placed on the table in front of her. Yep, it was definitely a teapot. A moment later her mother returned with a platter of miscellaneous snack foods. Vaguely snack food-shaped blobs, rather, as best as Jian could see them. 

“Hush,” her mother cajoled, taking a moment to adjust Jian’s collar and push her hair out of her face. A knock sounded from the front door, followed by her mother’s melodramatic gasp. “They’re here!” 

“Who’s he—” Jian started to ask, but her mother was already up, racing for the door. She turned to face Jian one more time before she left the room. She fixed her daughter with a look of pity. 

“Oh, Jianling… you look so beautiful. I just wish you didn’t insist on wearing your hair like that.” 

“What’s wrong with my hair?!” Jian shrieked, a hand flying up the ribbon that bound her hair in its usual phoenix tail. 

She never found out, because when her mother returned, she was accompanied by a pair of strangers. One was a woman about her mother’s age, perhaps a bit older, and the other was a young man roughly Jian’s own age. Suddenly the afternoon’s puzzling events fell into place. The man was meant to be a potential suitor. 

The next hour was misery. Jian passed the time attempting to identify blurry objects in the back of the room, wishing her knees didn’t hurt, focusing her attention just about anywhere other than the man sitting across from her, and being endlessly frustrated by how little she’d been permitted to speak. This was supposed to be her future marriage on the line, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t she have more input than just a sparsely worded answer to a question here and there?

Jian had never seen her mother so obsequious. She fawned over the strange guests, offering them the finest of everything the house had to offer. She even remade the tea when the man’s hawkish old mother said she didn’t care for jasmine. If it had been Jian, she would have gotten a wooden spoon to the face for complaining about the tea her mother made. 

The young man was called Genzu. His mother was called Sunstra. Genzu seemed nice enough, Jian supposed. Or well, actually she couldn’t suppose that. He’d hardly spoken any more than Jian had. He kept his face mostly impassive, breaking his facade only once to shoot her a shy smile as his mother peppered Jian with all sorts of questions. It made Jian uncomfortable. Who was he to smile at her, like they were co-conspirators? They didn’t even know each other. She just pretended she hadn’t seen him. 

“You’re a student at Caldera City University?” Sunstra questioned. 

“That’s right.” Jian tried to look pleasant. 

“What do you study?” 

“Engineering.” 

“What about firebending? Do you take firebending classes? Your mother said you were a firebender.” 

“I am, but I stopped taking classes after I left the Royal Fire Academy for Girls.”

“Why?” Sunstra demanded, squaring her shoulders threateningly. Jian was grateful she didn’t have her glasses now. She didn’t want to see the detail on Sunstra’s glowering face. 

“I don’t know! It’s not really my thing. I didn’t like it very m—” 

Jian’s mother cut her off. Or rescued her, depending on how you looked at it. 

“What Jianling is trying to say is that her talents were better focused elsewhere. She really is a gifted engineering student.” 

“It’s just Jian,” Jian asserted, feeling a sudden surge of bravery. Everyone stared. “I don’t like to be called Jianling. Call me Jian.” 

After a moment’s silence, Sunstra hummed with displeasure. 

“Engineering, huh? Do you intend to work?”

“Yeah, that’s the idea.” Jian scowled. Let her mother’s subsequent wrath be a problem for another day. 

Sunstra turned to Genzu and whispered “That’s something to think about, dear. You’ll have to hire a maid if she’s going to be out of the house all day” as if Jian and her mother weren’t right there. 

Jian’s mother spent the next fifteen minutes or so trying in vain to repair the irreparable dent Jian had just put in her own reputation as a prospective bride. Sunstra, at least, had the courtesy to pretend it was working. At the very end of the meeting, as was the custom, Jian and Genzu were left alone together for a short while. 

They avoided each other’s eyes, for the most part, save for a few stolen glances. Genzu probably thought Jian was just shy and not practically blind. 

“So…” Genzu prodded. 

“So.” Jian prodded back. 

“Engineering?” 

“Yeah. And I’m good at it.” Jian said, jutting out her chin and steeling herself for whatever he would say next. 

But he smiled, a warm, honeyed smile. 

“That’s really cool.” 

Genzhu and his mother were ushered out of the house not long after that. Jian’s mother trailed behind them, showering them in compliments and insisting that they take snacks for the road. She told Sunstra that Genzu seemed like a promising young man, and that he and Jian seemed to really hit it off. Sunstra told her that she’d “be in touch.” So Jian was never going to see either of them ever again. 

Relieved to see them go (relieved to see everything, now that she was permitted to put her glasses back on) Jian contemplated how she would spend what was left of her evening. It was only after she poured herself a drink and cracked open a book that she noticed her mother still hadn’t left the doorway. 

“Mom?” Jian called, but her mother didn’t move. She stood, shoulders stooped, facing the closed door. One of her hands rested on its frame. 

Upon closer inspection, her mother was crying. Tears streamed silently from her eyes and dribbled onto the floor. 

_ “Mom?”  _ Jian called again, far more urgently this time. 

Without turning around, her mother balled her hand into a fist and banged on the doorframe. 

Thud. 

“Why?” She pleaded, her voice quivering with emotion, “Why do you sabotage everything I try to give you?” 

Jian didn’t know what to say. Her mother whirled around. The tears came just as readily now as they had before, and they weren’t so silent now. 

“I worked hard to arrange this meeting, you know that? I pestered everyone I know with a son who graduated from the Royal Academy the same year you did. I worked overtime. I baked them sweets and did them favors. You do well in school and you’re pretty, but without a father to seek out these kinds of prospects for you…” She paused. Her voice disintegrated into a wordless whimper before she collected herself again. “I just want the best for you.” 

Any smugness Jian had been feeling shriveled up inside her and died. The truth is that it never occurred to her that her mother had to convince Genzu and Sunstra to consider the match. 

“I’m sorry,” she said finally, and lamely. It didn’t make up for undoing all her mother’s hard work and she knew it. 

“Why?” Her mother pressed again. Jian had assumed that question was rhetorical the first time her mother posed it. “Don’t you want the best for yourself?” 

“I…” Jian started uneasily. She always thought it was obvious. It was something of a running gag in their family. Her mother would press the issue, and Jian would resist it. But it had always seemed friendly, until now. Now was the time for honesty. “I don’t want to get married.” Jian admitted. Her actions had been repeating the phrase for months now, but this was the first time she actually said it out loud. 

Her mother actually smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I know. You want a job.” It was true. Jian did want a job, and she had been about to say so. Her mother continued, “And if you want a job, then I want you to have a job. But… what if you can’t get one?” 

“I can though!” 

“But what if you can’t?”

“How hard can it be? I’ll work in a ramen shop for a few years if I have to.” 

“A  _ good _ job, Jian. A job that’ll pay you enough to actually sustain yourself. Working in a ramen shop can’t give you the kind of life you deserve. You’ve worked too hard for that.” 

Jian felt very much like a steaming pile of dragon moose dung. She grabbed her mother by the forearm and directed her to the cushions by the table. Jian lay her head on her mother’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry about how tonight went. Really, I am. But… I’m only nineteen. I still have a year left at the university. Surely there’s still time before we start cementing my future. Especially if it’s not even the future I want.” 

“I can’t support you forever. Even if I wish I could,” her mother pointed out. 

“I know. I don’t expect you to. Just give me a chance, okay? Let me at least try and fail to secure a job before we start assuming I won’t get one. Is that fair?” 

“If we wait too long, you won’t be as marriageable.” 

“Give me a year after I graduate. If I don’t have a job by then, a good job, I mean, then you can start seeking matches and I won’t complain,” Jian entreated. 

“Or sabotage them,” her mother added. A trace of humor flickered across her features. 

“Or sabotage them,” Jian agreed. “Deal?” 

Her mother accepted the deal. For the first time ever, Jian had a chance. 


	5. Out With the Old New, In With the New New

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko returns with Toph, and the nation thinks everything has gone back to normal. Zuko is not so sure that is has.

Zuko couldn't decide what rattled the nation more: that he was alive, or that he'd returned with Toph, who he instantly appointed as the new head of palace security. This might not have been so shocking for the old Zuko. The old Zuko was capricious and desperate, executing half-baked plans to capture the avatar by whatever means necessary. The old Zuko had no place in a respectable royal court. But he was the new Zuko now. The new Zuko was a responsible leader, who only proceeded with a plan if it could be done with an abundance of caution. The new Zuko avoided rash decision making and went out of his way to not make enemies with anyone. He remembered all too clearly what it was like when he was enemies with nearly everyone. His impromptu mental health retreat in the jungle and then his subsequent reappearance with a risky new hire just didn't tally with most people's idea of who Zuko had been in recent years. 

He was still the new Zuko, right? His mental breakdown hadn't reverted him back to the old Zuko? That couldn't be. The old Zuko was so angry all the time; and the current Zuko didn't feel any anger at all. He'd demonstrated some unpredictable behavior, sure, but it hadn't been fueled by rage and insecurity like everything in his life was back then. Despite what outward appearances might suggest, he felt fantastic. He felt in control. 

Maybe he was the new new Zuko now, and the old new Zuko was just the old Zuko. (The old old Zuko, then, was no longer relevant enough to be worth anyone's time). He was optimistic about what the new new Zuko might bring. Maybe now, after all these years, he could live his life on his own terms. No abusive fathers to please, no royal expectations to live up to, just... him. The new new Zuko. 

That didn't mean it would be easy. There were still obstacles, and Zuko could list offhand several big ones, all of whom bore the title of "Minister." 

"You need to fire all your ministers and get new ones. Better ones. Like... Katara maybe? or Sokka! I don't think Sokka is doing anything important right now," Toph suggested, in response to Zuko's most recent long-winded complaint about Hansuke. It was the forth or fifth long-winded complaint about someone on Zuko's council she'd endured in the past week. 

"Toph," Zuko grumbled, enunciating her name with a warning in his tone, "I can't just fire all my ministers and replace them with our friends. That's called nepotism, and it's highly frowned upon." 

"Nepotism, schmepotism. You hired me, didn't you? What about the old guy?" 

"If by 'the old guy' you mean former Head of Palace Security Sheng Wan, he retired."

"Riiiight, right..."

"He did!" 

"Okay!" Toph held her hands defensively in front of her. "I'm just saying. It sounds like your job would be a lot easier if you had a better council. Why can't you get rid of them again? You're the fire lord, you should be able to do whatever you want." 

"Because it's against the law. Ministers of that rank receive a lifetime appointment. They only leave if they die, quit, or commit a felony." He counted off on his fingers for emphasis. 

Toph tapped a contemplative finger to her chin. "What if we made it look like they committed a felony? I know this guy who—"

"Absolutely not." 

"Fine! Whatever. It's your funeral." 

"Actually, my funeral was about a month ago. I was unable to attend, as I was out of town that day," Zuko replied with a smirk. Toph released a snort-laugh. 

Jokes aside, Zuko would have preferred not to be having this conversation. He'd had a niggling suspicion that her appointment could be considered nepotism since the day he hired her. It was true, Head of Palace Security Sheng Wan did retire, something he'd been planning since before Zuko left, but it still felt underhanded, somehow, to hire Toph instead of promoting any one of the lower ranking security officers who probably deserved it. 

It's not like Toph wasn't qualified, at least not in terms of her fighting ability. She could take out twenty dudes double her size without breaking a sweat, and that wasn't even a hypothetical scenario. Zuko had seen it. But commanding Palace Security required more than just combat skills. It was a leadership role, and as such, the person in that role needed to behave professionally and boost the morale of their subordinates. Speaking of which.

"Toph, why do you hang out with me in my office all the time? Shouldn't you be getting to know your subordinates?"

Toph, who was currently using the flame-shaped prongs on her metal security badge to pick dirt out from under her toenails, seemed taken aback. "I don't see why. They already know who I am." 

Zuko shoved her feet off his desk to clear a space for the stack of tomes he'd been holding. "Yeah, but do you know who they are?" 

"I don't need to. I'm their boss. They just do what I tell them." 

"Why don't you eat lunch with them in the mess hall?" Zuko offered.

"I'd rather not."

Zuko narrowed his eyes at her. "Let me rephrase that: go eat lunch with them in the mess hall."

"But I don't want to!" 

"Toph!" Zuko snapped, allowing his blatant displeasure to creep into his voice. "We're friends. I get that. But now, you're also a member of my staff. And that means you'll have to take orders from me. If you can't handle that, I can find someone else to fill the role." 

Toph muttered indistinctly, gathering her belongings and hauling herself up from the slouching position she'd maintained the entire conversation. 

"And Toph?" Zuko added when she was almost out the door. She paused and scowled at him. "Make a point to actually talk to them, will you? You might even have fun." 

"Doubt it." And she was gone.

Later that afternoon Zuko received a letter from Earth King Kuei. It was a terse, snippy little piece of correspondence that scolded him for pardoning an Earth Kingdom criminal. It contained a half-hearted threat, that he’d better repeal the decision  _ or else.  _ Or else what, Kuei? Zuko burned the letter upon receiving it. 

There had been nothing in the letter about the fact that Zuko had been missing for six months and presumed dead. Other than the reference to Toph’s newly granted pardon, the letter contained nothing that oriented it in any timeline. It might as well have been written last year, or five years ago. It’s not like Zuko expected fanfare to signal his return, but he had expected people to at least acknowledge it. He tried to imagine an extra line added at the bottom of the page.  _ P.S. Glad to see you’re back.  _ Never mind. That was stupid. 

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum there had been Uncle, who had hugged him so tightly he couldn’t breathe. Reuniting with Uncle had been very high on Zuko’s list of priorities, but at some point, Zuko wanted to break free so he could bathe and shave off the ridiculous beard he’d grown. Uncle, however, had other ideas, and squeezed his ribs and wept into his shoulder for what felt like hours. 

His friends wrote letters, too, saying they were glad he was okay or that they’d missed him. But aside from Zuko’s inner circle, everyone seemed to just want to go back to business as usual. Zuko had always despised being the center of attention, and so that should have been fine with him. Yet something bothered him about it. 

He’d changed so much since he’d been gone, and even before that, really. It all started when he fainted in that afternoon meeting. Ever since, he’d attained a new sense of clarity and purpose. He felt like he could see now,  _ really  _ see, when he’d been straining to look through a gossamer cloth his entire life before. Everyone else, it seemed, spent the past six months more or less the same way they’d spent the past six years. Couldn’t they tell that everything was going to be different now? Couldn’t they feel it?

Actually, there was someone who could feel it. Qin. 

He’d been uncharacteristically silent in their weekly meetings, but not because he wasn’t paying attention. He watched Zuko carefully, almost threateningly, with a predatory glint in his eyes. He wanted something, or perhaps he was anticipating something, but Zuko didn’t know what. He resolved to find out. 

“Minister Qin, please stay behind. We need to talk.” 

Minister Qin, who had risen from the table and started to collect his belongings, wordlessly sat back down. His face remained frustratingly neutral, and Zuko couldn’t tell if that was on purpose or not. 

“Yes, My Lord?” 

_ “What?”  _

“...What?” 

Zuko cradled his forehead in his palm. Of course Qin would play dumb. 

“You know what. You never talk, and you spend every meeting staring at me like you’re plotting my murder.” 

“Well, I think I was absolved of any accusations when you turned up alive.”

_ “Qin.” _

“...May I show you something, Your Majesty?” 

Zuko raised his only eyebrow. “If it will explain why you’ve been more aloof than usual, then I would encourage it.” 

Qin stood, rummaged through his bag, and extricated several large scrolls of paper. He approached Zuko, and unfurled them on the table where they both could see it. On the clean paper surface Zuko saw diagrams of… airships? Really nice airships. The kind of technology that would have put the airfleet his father used on the day of Sozin’s Comet to shame. 

“These… aren’t passenger ships,” Zuko observed. And that’s all it was. An observation. 

“No. They aren’t.” Qin held his gaze steadily. It wasn’t a challenge. Not quite. 

There were other diagrams, too. Canons, tanks, even some kind of bomb that could decimate a significantly wider radius than any weapon before. It was obvious that Qin had put more than a few month’s worth of work into these. 

“Qin…” Zuko started, carefully, “If we were to actually build any of these things, it would be a clear violation of the terms of the treaty.” 

To Qin’s credit, he didn’t react. “Yes. It would.” When Zuko didn’t instantly object, he continued. “And it’s also a clear violation of the treaty to maintain the Dai Li at the level that the Earth Kingdom has been, but King Kuei doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, the whole world seems awfully willing to look the other way.” 

Zuko narrowed his eyes. “So what are you saying?” 

“I’m saying that the Fire Nation won’t be the ‘bad guys’ forever. There were plenty of instances before the Hundred Year War that the Earth Kingdom infringed on our territory. Occasionally the Water Tribes did it too. The terms of the treaty go beyond what’s fair. They’re punitive. When the day comes that some other nation decides to invade our shores,  _ and it will,  _ we’ll be defenseless if we abide by the terms in the treaty. The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes made sure of that.” 

“So these weapons would be strictly defensive.” 

“Yes! Of course. Just having them means we probably wouldn’t have to use them. They’re nothing more than a tool of diplomacy. A deterrent.” 

“A deterrent.” 

“Yes, My Lord. ...If it is your wish, I will destroy these documents and never mention it again.” 

“No, wait,” Zuko urged. “Don’t destroy them. It’s worth considering.” What was he saying? The old new Zuko would have slapped him. It’s just that Qin wasn’t not making sense. 

Qin looked pleased, but also like he had the wherewithal to hide it. He rolled up the scrolls and packed them back into his bag. 

“As you wish, My Lord.” 


	6. The View from the Ninety-Ninth Row

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A teenaged earthbender in Ba Sing Se finds a job opportunity at the end of the 100 year war. 
> 
> (Posting a bit early because I am going to be busy tomorrow)

What a momentous occasion to mark Renshu’s first time in the royal palace. His home in the upper ring was nothing to scoff at, but it couldn’t compare to the opulence of the room he was standing in now. It was everything his parents had described and more. He only hoped he looked like he knew what he was doing here. He hoped he looked like the promising descendant of his talented and decorated parents, but he suspected otherwise. He probably just looked like Renshu. Geeky, insecure, sixteen-year-old Renshu. At least he had Thein. If he looked out of place here, at least he wouldn’t be alone. 

Renshu tore his eyes away from the ceremony to give his little brother a reassuring smile. His little brother, who— 

“Thien!” Renshu hissed as quietly as he could without sacrificing any of the urgency in his tone. One of the nobles, a man Renshu didn’t recognize, turned around to glare at them both, so clearly he hadn’t been quiet enough. 

“These clothes are itchy, okay?? And it’s so hot in here,” Thien whispered back, shamelessly scratching under his collar with one hand and fanning himself with the other. 

“This is a historic occasion! You need to behave yourself!” 

“Yeah, and we’re standing in, like, the ninety-ninth row. It’s not like the earth king can see me.” 

Renshu made a “hmmph” noise just as an elderly woman to Thien’s left shushed him. Whatever. Renshu couldn’t control Thien, but at least he could make himself look respectable. 

After all, it  _ was  _ a historic occasion. The Hundred Year War had come to an end. The very war that destroyed his family’s village (even if Renshu personally never lived there) was finally over. Moreover, the Fire Nation princess had been ousted and Earth King Kuei was, literally at this very moment, having his rightful place on the throne restored to him. To think, none of them ever had to fear a Fire Nation invasion ever again… 

That, and Renshu’s Aunt had been appointed as King Kuei’s new grand secretariat. That was the real reason they were here. Renshu’s parents had met the King Kuei, but it’s not like they knew him very well. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Rika, they probably would have been standing outside in the courtyard with the rest of the overflow. As far as Renshu was concerned, it didn’t matter  _ why _ they got to be here. It just mattered that they  _ did.  _

The royal guanmao was placed atop Kuei’s tonsured head and the crowd roared. They would have roared no matter what, as they all wanted to show due respect to their king, but there was raw, powerful emotion behind their whoops and hollers. Renshu could hear it. They had all just escaped near subjugation and possible death via Fire Nation, and now their real leader had been reinstated. Sure, no one was supposed to talk about it. There was no war in Ba Sing Se, except when there was. They might not talk about it, but they could scream and cheer about it. Renshu screamed with them. 

But now there really was no war in Ba Sing Se. There was no war anywhere. It was almost unbelievable. 

Aunt Rika knelt at King Kuei’s right. He turned and placed the ceremonial beads on her shoulders. He said something as he did, but Renshu was too far away to really hear it. It was probably something about how smart and capable Aunt Rika was. And it was true. Aunt Rika would do the Earth Kingdom proud. Renshu made a mental note to ask her about it later. She stood, now shoulder to shoulder with King Kuei, and once again the crowd erupted. 

King Kuei now turned to address the audience. He proceeded to deliver a speech that probably only the first thirty rows could make out in its entirety. Renshu caught some words here and there. Stuff like “peace” and “prosperity.” Then he transitioned into something Renshu guessed was about the war. He caught words like “perseverance” and “victorious.” Renshu smiled and nodded along, filling in the gaps with his mind. He’d ad-libbed a pretty good speech, if he did say so himself. 

The crowd started to disperse when it was over. This far back there was no order to it. People just shuffled along at that snail sloth’s pace that is universally adopted when large crowds of people attempt to move anywhere in unison. Renshu and Thien spotted their parents and sister Liling. Being high-ranking Dai Li officials, Renshu’s elder family members had been allowed much closer to the king than Renshu and Thien. Not as close as Aunt Rika, of course. Sorry—Grand Secretariat Aunt Rika.

“Boys!” Their mother called when she spied them. She outstretched an arm and placed it around Renshu’s shoulders. “What did you think of the ceremony?” 

“It was amazing! I’ll remember it for the rest of my life!” Renshu exclaimed. At approximately the same time, Thien replied, “It was kinda boring.” 

Renshu’s mother Diu frowned almost imperceptibly at her youngest child. Renshu wisely changed the subject. 

“I can’t wait to ask Aunt Rika about it at dinner tonight!” 

“Aunt Rika won’t be joining us for dinner tonight. She’s been invited to join King Kuei and his ministers for a banquet.” Renshu’s father, Isang, informed them. 

“Oh,” Renshu’s face fell, but then it occurred to him that he would have even more to ask Aunt Rika about when he eventually did see her. “Well, tomorrow night, then.” 

Isang tilted his head playfully. “Why not tonight?” 

Renshu frowned. “Well, because she’s going to the…” Then it dawned on him. “Wait, you mean we get to come to the banquet too?!” 

“You did that on purpose!” Thien accused, but even he seemed interested in the prospect of attending a royal banquet. Isang just laughed. 

“Let’s stop by the shopping district on our way home. The boys will need new clothes for tonight,” Diu suggested, and off they went. Renshu still couldn’t believe he was going to dine with the earth king. He was euphoric just thinking about it. 

\--------

Dining with the earth king was… decidedly not euphoric. In fact, it was terrifying. Had he sweated through his new fancy outfit? Was he holding his chopsticks wrong? Had the first course been a soup, or was he supposed to wash his hands in it? At least King Kuei hadn’t spoken directly to him. If that happened, Renshu might actually pass out. 

“You’re Diu and Isang’s boy, is that right?” King Kuei asked nonchalantly. Who had he been speaking to? Renshu was Diu and Isang’s boy. One of them, anyway. The king must have been confused. 

The king blinked expectantly at him. Renshu realized his error too late. 

“Yes, Your Majesty. This is my eldest son, Renshu,” Diu swooped in to his rescue. Luckily King Kuei didn’t seem offended. He stoked his temple thoughtfully as he looked Renshu over. 

“Renshu, yes, that’s right. Your father tells me you’re something of a prodigy with numbers,” said King Kuei. Wait, what? The earth king had heard of him before? 

“Yes, that’s right, Your Majesty. I balance the family’s books in exchange for some spending money,” Renshu offered nervously. He attempted to bow, but it was awkward seated at a table with a full plate in front of him. 

“Hmm,” King Kuei hummed, scrutinizing him even more closely than before. Luckily he didn’t look displeased. “How old are you, Renshu?” 

“Sixteen, Your Majesty. Almost seventeen.” Renshu cringed at his own answer. He wished he hadn’t added that last part. The king asked how old he was, not how old he almost was. It probably came off as childish. 

“Almost seventeen, huh? Well that’s almost old enough to get a grown up job. I hope you’ll consider joining my staff when you decide to look for employment. My accounting department could use a bright young man like you.” 

“Are… Are you offering me a job?” Renshu blurted. The king would surely think he was classless bumpkin with no filter. Any job offer that might have existed was certainly gone now. 

The king laughed. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Renshu’s parents laughed, too, but they seemed like they were only following King Kuei’s lead. Had Renshu ruined the entire banquet? Aunt Rika would kill him when this was over with. 

“Well, I was going to wait until you were a little older, but I suppose sixteen is old enough to work. I became king when I was only four! Now, you should go home and discuss this with your family. Diu and Isang are levelheaded people; they’ll help you make the right choi—” 

Renshu rose from his seat, bumping the table and causing the delicate dishware to clatter in the process. He smoothed out his robes in an effort to recover from his clumsiness, then bowed to the earth king again. Properly, this time. When he addressed the king afterwards, his voice crackled with excitement.

“Your Majesty, I am deeply honored to accept your offer!” 

Everyone was silent. Not even his parents knew what to say. After what felt like hours, King Kuei let out another round of raucous laughter. 

“What a passionate, dedicated young person! Very well. You start first thing tomorrow. Don’t be late.” 

“I won’t let you down!” 

\------

“Ow, Liling, stop it!” Renshu cried. His hands flew instinctively to his injured scalp. 

Liling swatted them away. “Mom told me to do your hair. Either you hold still, or I’ll stick a wad of chewed-up rice in your top knot.” 

“Ugh, I’m gonna be late on my first day, and then I’m gonna get fired, and then the earth king is gonna hate me and it’s all gonna be your fault!” 

“Children!” Diu snapped, striding into the room already dressed in her graceful Dai Li attire. 

Renshu crossed his arms and huffed. It took every ounce of his willpower to not squirm under Liling’s aggressive hair-pulling. 

“Don’t you look smart? My little working man,” Diu cooed, evaluating Renshu’s carefully selected outfit. 

“Does it look okay? I mean, they’ll give me a uniform when I get there, but I’m not sure if I’ll change into it there, or if I’ll just wear this the rest of the day and wear my new uniform tomorrow, and either way I want to look presentable when I see King Kuei,” Renshu felt himself rambling. 

Liling snorted. “You’re not going to see King Kuei. You actually think he micromanages his accountants? You’ll have a supervisor.” 

Renshu felt rather foolish as he realized she was probably right. “Well! Still! I need to look nice!” 

“You look great, sweetie,” Diu soothed, kissing his forehead before leaving for the day. Renshu hopped off his chair and scrambled to collect what he would need for work. 

“Mom already left the house! I need to go now or I’ll be late!” 

“You’re welcome for doing your hair! Oh, and a piece of advice?” 

“Y-yeah?” Renshu ventured. A wicked grin crossed Liling’s face. 

“You better go  _ now. _ I hear they take employees who are late on their first day and ship them off to the Fire Nation.” 

Renshu emitted a shrill “eep” and hurried out. 

A short walk and a monorail ride later and there it was. The imposing royal palace in which Renshu was about to set foot for the third time in his life. But this time, he was an employee. This time he belonged there. 

This was it. This was the birth of his career. And he was already running late.


	7. If You Stand for Nothing Then What Will You Fall For?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko gets some upsetting news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween! (This chapter isn't Halloween-themed. It just coincides with the date)

Toph dropped by Zuko’s office unannounced, again. What else was new, really? 

“We should go to the beach!” She exclaimed, throwing the door open with much more force than necessary. Zuko’s porcelain teacup rattled a few times before it fell off the desk and broke. 

We should—ahg, Toph, what?” Zuko asked irritably. He was only devoting about a third of his brain power to deciphering whatever she was talking about. The other two thirds were devoted to his paperwork and cleaning up the broken teacup, respectively. 

As he knelt on the floor and used a segment of the curtain to absorb the spill, Toph leaned against his desk, oblivious. 

“C’mon, let your hair down every once in a while, Fire Lord Frowny-Face. There’s a beach around here, right? Oh! Or maybe we could go to your family’s beach house on Ember Island. Do you still have that? Actually, it doesn’t matter. We could just stay at a hotel! We could stay somewhere fancy and get room service! Sip overpriced cocktails while some underling scrubs the grime off my feet…” 

“Don’t call people ‘underlings.’ It’s rude. I really shouldn’t have to explain that to you,” Zuko shook his head, trying to clear out enough space to deal with Toph right now. “And anyway, what are you even talking about? Why would we do any of those things?” 

“To celebrate!” 

“To celebrate  _ what? _ ” He was losing patience. 

“That I apprehended that guy!” 

“What guy?” 

“The guy who was trying to kill you!” 

_ “What?” _

For once, even Toph realized that they were experiencing a communication error. 

“No one told you…?” She ventured, using her inside voice for the first time that day. “Damn, they don’t tell you anything, do they?” 

“No!” Zuko snarled, putting away his paperwork to prepare for what was clearly a more pressing issue. “They don’t!” 

He shoved passed Toph, not even caring that he was leaving her unattended in his office, before he got halfway down the hall and turned back. 

“Toph, where am I even going? Where’s the guy?”

“Oh, don’t bother, he’s long gone.” 

“You mean…?” 

“I mean that I passed him off to my subordinates! Jeez, I didn’t kill him! You’ve been accusing me of a lot of murder lately.” 

“Toph, where is he?” 

“I don’t know!” 

“Who is he?!” 

“I don’t know that either!” 

“Well,” Zuko stammered, piecing together whatever bits of information he could. “Can you describe him? What did he look like?” 

“Oh, you know, I didn’t get a very good look at him. But he sure sounded like a swell guy!” 

“Right. Sorry. Stupid question. Just take me to the last place you encountered him.” 

Toph led the way, all the while muttering both sides of an imaginary conversation to herself. “By the way, thanks for saving my life, Toph!” “Oh, sure, no problem, Zuko!” 

Luckily they ran into a group of palace guards on the way. The guards hastily bowed to the pair of them.

“Take me to him,” Zuko demanded. He’d lost all patience for preamble, and he knew they’d know who he was talking about. 

Each of them started to put up a halfhearted protest, but something about Zuko’s face must have made them realize he was in no mood to be toyed with. 

\-------

It was Governor Ukano. Or well,  _ former _ Governor Ukano, after what he did. Tried to do. Whatever. 

Zuko hadn’t been especially surprised to learn that it was him. Not that Zuko suspected him—he hadn’t—but ever since his coronation, Zuko was seeing new sides of people that hadn’t been before. Somehow, just by the simple act of being fire lord, Zuko had made himself inherently controversial, even if he hadn’t done anything. Just the very act of wearing the crown made his presence up for debate. Plenty of people Zuko had been scarcely acquainted with before the end of the war had now decided it was their business to engage in that debate. 

No, it wasn’t the identity of Zuko’s would-be assassin that bothered him. It was what he said. 

At first Zuko had been livid. He was so sure he was right. Even more so at Ukano’s answer to the question of why he’d done what he did. 

“I felt cheated out of the future that I spent my entire life building.” 

“So you’re telling me,” Zuko began, pinching the bridge of his nose and laughing with more than a hint of anger in his voice, “that without a nationwide quest for global domination, you have no future? Is your definition of yourself really so narrow that you don’t know who you are unless you have somebody to subjugate?” 

“It’s not the war. It’s you.” 

“Me? Oh, so you just can’t handle living under a regime that supports peace and equality—” 

But Ukano interrupted him, shaking his head. 

“But you don’t support peace and equality. You don’t support anything.” 

Perhaps what had enraged Zuko the most was that he hadn’t even sounded like he was trying to argue, or injure Zuko’s ego. He sounded like he truly just wanted Zuko to understand. 

Zuko left after that, his mind buzzing with half-formed defenses and comebacks that never made it to his lips. That might have been because deep down, Zuko knew there was nothing he could say that would change Ukano’s stance. 

Was Ukano right? Of course Zuko stood for peace and equality, he’d ended the war!  _ But Aang really ended it. You just stood by his side and pretended you helped, _ a nasty voice in his head retorted. Fine, but after the war was over, Zuko had done everything in his power to maintain peace. He’d made a plan to relinquish the colonies!  _ Only because Aang told you to. You didn’t want to. You were afraid of offending someone in your royal court. _ That voice again. Zuko slapped himself in the temple, as if that would jar the voice loose. 

Zuko had come a long way since his adolescence, but how much of it had actually been his idea? Hadn’t his friends had to teach him what it meant to be a kind person? Hadn’t he resisted it? Hadn’t it always felt strange and uncomfortable, like wearing someone else’s clothes? 

Being the fire lord was no different. Actually, it was worse. He’d had ministers and palace staff to teach him that, and it was complicated by the fact that he didn’t entirely trust their judgement. He’d spent the past nine years trying to juggle his people’s expectations of him with that of his friends. They weren’t compatible with each other, but more importantly, they weren’t his own. 

If Zuko didn’t already know how to be a good person by now, he probably never would. Wasn’t it time to just trust himself? If he messed up, surely those consequences couldn’t be worse than continuing on his current path. Even if he had to live with his mistakes, he could take comfort in the fact that he’d done  _ something.  _ Making poor decisions was better than not making any. 

He took a deep breath, and pushed open his office door. Toph was already inside. She must’ve gone back after she’d declined to go with him to face Ukano. 

“Well?” 

Zuko thought for a moment. When he finally spoke, he felt confident it was the right thing to say. 

“Let’s go to the beach.” 

\-------

As much as Zuko would have wanted to believe otherwise, he just wasn’t a carefree, easygoing type. As it turned out, he much preferred the  _ idea _ of going to the beach to celebrate reaching a conclusion about himself through a whole lot of careful introspection over actually being there. As soon as his toes sank into the warm sand, he was immediately reminded that he didn’t actually like the beach at all. 

Toph befriended a chatty group of strangers, and even convinced them to buy her several drinks and some fire flakes. She refused to join their volleyball game (the ball spent more time in the air than anywhere else, and the air just wasn’t Toph’s comfort zone), but she agreed to sit on the sidelines and supply humorous commentary. She flirted with virtually everyone, and won their respect by building them elaborate sand castles with her earthbending. 

A passerby wouldn’t even have realized that she and Zuko had arrived together. Zuko sat cross-legged under an umbrella, tracing nonsensical patterns in the sand with his index finger. After having done so much overthinking already, he found it difficult to extract anything coherent from his racing mind. All he knew for certain was the voice in his mind screaming at him to make a change. Any change, it didn’t even matter. He just knew he couldn’t carry on like the past few months hadn’t happened. 

Late in the day, when he’d already watched his shadow move and elongate across the beach, he decided to call it quits. He scanned the area for Toph, and found her at the bar, talking animatedly with several strangers there. Different strangers than the group from earlier. Whatever, she could find her own way back. She was a grown woman, after all. Zuko packed up everything he’d brought with him and left without a word to anyone. 

He’d meant to go directly to his chamber to drop off his umbrella and towel and change to some clothes that were decidedly less sandy. When he passed Qin enjoying an evening cup of tea under a veranda, he stopped. 

“My Lord?” Qin snapped to attention upon seeing him, all business despite the late hour. Zuko took the liberty of pulling out the chair opposite Qin and taking a seat. 

Zuko didn’t bother with a greeting. He knew Qin hated small talk anyway. “If we were to build those ‘tools of diplomacy’ you showed me, how would we do it?” 

Qin held his gaze for a few beats of silence, as if trying to discern his sincerity. Zuko stared steadfastly back at him. 

“Well, first we would need to draw up a budget. I have an approximate idea of those numbers, of course, but we would need something more concrete, rooted in the actual market value of the necessary supplies and labor. Next we would have to…” 

Making plans with Qin felt better than sulking on the beach. On the beach he was powerless. Anything effective he might have aspired to do would have to wait until he returned from the beach. But now, drawing up a real course of action with Qin, he felt like he was making a change. 

Zuko felt better, and when he finally returned to his office, he was unexpectedly greeted by Toph’s second-in-command, pacing outside his door. He couldn’t even hide the panic in his eyes when he addressed Zuko. He didn’t bow, either. Whatever he had to say apparently took precedence over any such formalities. 

“It’s your sister. She’s escaped.” 


	8. Insiders and Outsiders

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: References to the air nomad genocide.

Rima hovered over the unfinished confection, trying to concentrate on the finer points of her bending stance. She flicked her hand upward, in a motion reminiscent of a jellyfish bobbing to the surface of the ocean, thereby whipping air into the brightly colored pastry cream. It didn’t look like the others that Sister Sonam had finished for her (strictly for demonstration purposes, of course. Sister Sonam had made it very clear that this task was hers to finish), but it looked alright. After all, she’d succeeded in making the cream airy, and even if it didn’t have that aesthetically pleasing spiral pattern, it would still taste just fine. Surely someone would be willing to barter something of value for it. 

Rima took a step backward to survey her handiwork when Sister Sonam appeared so suddenly that she may as well have materialized out of nowhere. 

“No, not like that,” Sister Sonam scolded, taking it upon herself to correct Rima’s work. The whipped cream took on the right shape now, but there was something off about the texture. It stood too tall and firm. Sister Sonam sighed. “Now it’s over-whipped…” she lamented, setting the pastry aside from the others. 

“I guess we’ll just have to eat that one ourselves,” Rima offered, along with an apologetic shrug. She was sorry, sort of. Though, not if it meant she got a free dessert out of her mistake. 

Sister Sonam did not reply. Her face remained impassive, looking down at the ruined pastry. Rima noticed that she began to slice it and dish up two servings on ceramic platters. 

“You’d better not be ruining the product on purpose,” Sister Sonam warned, holding the dish just outside of her reach. 

“I’m not! I’m just bad at this!” Rima protested, in spite of her indignance, she chuckled. 

“Mmm-hmm,” Sister Sonam hummed, taking a bite of the slice she’d dished up for herself. “You’re bad at this _right now_. You won’t be forever.” 

“Oh yeah? Were you bad at this when you first started working here?” 

Sister Sonam frowned, her gaze angled just over the top of Rima’s head. She had the distant expression of someone whose mind and body were in two different places. “Well, no,” she said carefully, “but that’s besides the point. You earned your tattoos earlier than I did, you know. There’s more to life than whipping pastry cream.” 

“Really?” Rima drank up the encouragement. Sister Sonam had been talented and put-together as long as Rima had known her, and the two were only about ten years apart in age. It was inconceivable to think that Rima had accomplished anything sooner or better than Sister Sonam. 

“Really,” Sister Sonam affirmed, licking a glob of the fruit filling off the tip of her index finger. “This batch is really tasty. Did I make this one, or did you?” 

“I did.” 

“You did? See! You’ll be a master baker yet.” Sister Sonam polished off her plate and retreated to the other room where she had left some dough to rise. 

Rima finished her own portion and carried on whipping the pastry cream. The next few looked better than the previous, but they still lacked the geometric perfection that Sister Sonam’s always had. Still, not too shabby for an apprentice baker. 

Next on the list was preparing the fruit filling for the next batch. This one called for a mixed berry medley to be mashed and folded into the custard, but Rima would have to wait on that, as the delivery boy hadn’t yet arrived. The original recipe called for diced moon peaches instead of berries, but it had long since been adapted to reflect the resources Rima’s village actually had at its disposal. Moon peaches didn’t grow here. In fact, Rima had never even seen one in person. She dipped the handle of her wooden spoon into the unflavored custard and tasted it, wondering what the original moon peach flavor might have tasted like. It was a strange feeling to long for something you’ve never had, and Rima tried to shake it off immediately. She had nothing to complain about. The berry medley was delicious. 

More than just moon peaches floated through Rima’s head on a lazy mid morning such as this one. The Air Temples had a lot of things Rima would never know; moon peaches were just beginning. Most of all she envied the freedom they had back then. To hop on a glider, or on the back of a sky bison and roam wherever she pleased… Some days she could feel her spirit straining against the confines of her tiny village. It was a pleasant place to grow up, sure, but every now and then her gaze shifted upward, past the treeline. She couldn’t help but feel like the thick forest that enclosed her home was tethering her to the ground with its dense network of roots and branches. 

Outside, a rustling of leaves and a plume of dust signalled the delivery boy’s return. 

“Tashi!” Rima greeted, rising to meet him just outside the doorway. She arrived just in time to watch him fold up his glider. He produced a lidded wicker basket, which he handed off. She peered inside. 

“It’s mostly blueberries this time. There wasn’t much else around. I hope that’s alright?” he explained, as she shook the basket from side to side to better view its contents. 

“It’s great. Thank you. I’ll get your payment,” Rima announced, then ran inside to drop off the berries. She swapped the wicker basted she’d been given for a cloth bundle of yesterday’s bread, which she passed to Tashi. 

“More of that flatbread stuff?” he inquired, having unwrapped one end of the package for inspection. 

“Yeah, we’re still running low on yeast, so I’ve been experimenting with recipes that don’t call for it. I added onions this time. It’s pretty good.” 

Tashi made a face. 

“Oh cmon, I’ll make a sweet version next time. Just try the onions!” Rima coaxed. 

“No—it’s not the onions. I’m sure it’ll be great. It’s just… If the yeast shortage continues much longer, we might have to send someone into town,” he fretted. 

Rima fell silent. “Into town,” meant outside the village, and everyone knew nothing good came from outside the village. Rima herself had never been sent, but she’d talked to those who had. They never encountered anything extraordinary. In fact, from the way they described the community of green-clad earthbenders, it sounded like they had more in common with the outsiders than not. But the risk they assumed by travelling anywhere at all, even to a town of kindly Earth Kingdom merchants… 

“It’ll talk to the brewery about it. Surely they can stretch their supply a little further,” Rima waved him off, hoping she exuded the confidence she didn’t feel. 

“Yeah... Well, thanks for bread!” Tashi supplied, making a polite but hasty exit. In a flutter of orange and yellow cloth, he lifted off the ground and was gone, leaving Rima alone with her thoughts. 

As much as Rima worried, she had always secretly hoped to be chosen for an expedition into town. She’d never met anyone who wasn’t an airbender. She’d never been outside the village. Even if the journey into town was really as uneventful as everyone claimed, she just wanted to be able to say she’d done it. She knew there was a world outside the village, but she wanted to see for herself, if only to verify that her little community really wasn’t alone on this vast earth. 

\------

The brewery turned up enough extra yeast to get them through the shortage, and so they didn’t need to venture into town after all. At least, not for that reason. But when Monk Yonten fell sick with a mysterious illness, they could no longer justify staying away from town. And so the process of selecting their ambassadors began. 

“Pleeease!” 

“Rima, you act like I have any more control than you do. Besides, I need you here. You’re my only apprentice this year,” Sister Sonam replied evenly. 

“But you know the elders better than I do!” 

Sister Sonam snorted. “Barely.” 

“You studied under Sister Dichen! You could put in a good word for me!” Rima pleaded. 

“Half the nuns in this village studied under Sister Dichen. She’s like the most powerful bender we’ve seen in generations. It won’t mean a thing.” 

“It has to mean something! You said she likes you!” 

“Rima. Enough. What part of ‘I need you here’ was unclear to you?” 

Rima tucked her knees to her chest and turned away from the pastry dough she’d been kneading. She was being childish and she knew it, but she’d wanted to leave the village for years now, and finally she was old enough to be chosen. To stay behind again was unbearable. 

Sister Sonam let her sulk in silence for a while. There was no sound aside from the birdsong drifting in through an open window and the occasional _smack_ that was produced when Sister Sonam slapped the dough she was kneading on the countertop. 

Rima had heard a rumor that Tashi was chosen, and that hardly seemed fair. She was two years older than he was, and he didn’t even want to go. 

“Maybe that’s why he was chosen. Did that ever occur to you?” Sister Sonam replied when Rima asked about it. 

“So they choose people who don’t even want to go?” Rima interrogated. That hardly made sense. 

“They choose people who will be careful. If you’re too excited about it, then you won’t be cautious when you’re out there.” 

“I would be cautious! I would be _so_ cautious,” Rima insisted. 

“Uh-huh. Tell it to the elders.” 

She wouldn’t tell it to the elders, of course. Once they made a decision, it was final. Rima knew her pleading would get her nowhere. She would just have to ask Tashi about it when he returned. She kneaded the dough in front of her with more force than was necessary. Sister Sonam raised an eyebrow in her direction, but wisely stayed quiet about it. 

\------

Life trudged on. Until the ambassadors returned, nobody had any means of communicating with them. Rima spent the days perfecting her cream-whipping technique, until her sugary spirals were nearly as perfect as Sister Sonam’s. 

She felt torn between resenting Tashi for the opportunity he had (the very same she had been deprived of!) and worrying for his safety. As much as Rima wanted to venture out of the village, she wasn’t naive. She knew the risks associated with it. Next time, she told herself. Next time she would work harder, come off as more level headed, and be the ideal candidate for the next expedition. But who knew how many years she would have to wait for something like that? Nothing interested ever happened here in the village. 

“Rima!” Sister Sonam’s voice rang out, uncharacteristically breathless and urgent. 

“Sister Sonam…? What’s goin—?” 

Sister Sonam shushed her. She extended a graceful arm around Rima’s shoulder and directed her underneath the countertop. Sister Sonam knelt below the counter with her, but intermittently lifted her head to peer out the window. 

“Is something wrong? Why do you keep—”

_“Shhh.”_

Something was definitely wrong. Was it Tashi? Had the ambassadors been found out? Were they captured? Were they dead? 

Rima felt her eyes well up with tears. The moisture bled into Sister Sonan’s tunic. 

“It’s Tashi, isn’t it? He’s captured, or worse, and I’ll never see him again!” Rima whispered, sort of. It was a loud whisper, and her voice quivered as she spoke. 

Perhaps Sister Sonam took pity on her, finally, or perhaps she felt guilty for keeping her in the dark. 

“Shh,” she stroked Rima’s hair as she spoke, “No, no. It’s not Tashi. As far as anyone knows, the ambassadors are fine. It’s…” she visibly swallowed and dropped her gaze, like she didn’t know how to phrase what she was about to say next. “It’s an outsider. He’s here. In the village.” 

Rima was too stunned to reply. She fixed her wide eyes on Sister Sonam, heart hammering loudly in her chest. 

_“Here?”_ She croaked finally. Nobody ever came to the village. Everyone prayed they would never run into trouble, but if they did, everyone guessed it would come from their expeditions into town. No one had been here in over a hundred years. No one but those who were supposed to be here. 

“Is he… f-fire…?” Rima didn’t bother to articulate a complete question. She knew Sister Sonam knew what she meant. 

Sister Sonam shook her head. They were so close together that Rima felt Sister Sonam’s hair brush up against her face as she did so. 

“No. At least, he doesn’t look like it. He looks like… like one of us.” 

That was impossible. 

“I know, I know. The elders are going to investigate. We’ll see what he has to say for himself. It might be a trick. How he found us is anyone’s guess.” 

Rima and Sister Sonam dared to peek through the window together. Off in the distance they saw him. The outsider. He was tall with a neat black beard. He wore air nomad clothing, but it clearly wasn’t anything from this village. Despite the distance, Rima could plainly see the pale blue arrow between his eyebrows. The elders stood in a tight semicircle several feet away. The man was clearly addressing them, but Rima was too far away to make out anything in their exchange. 

He didn’t look dangerous, Rima supposed, but she quashed that thought quickly. Her people had been open and trusting once. For many, it had cost them their lives. They wouldn’t make that same mistake again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alllllrighty, well you're probably going to either love or hate this. Personally, I've always found it a bit unrealistic that literally all the air nomads except Aang were killed by Sozin's invasion. It would have to mean that all of them were physically at the temples at the time. None were out traveling between temples, visiting the Earth Kingdom, out in nature, etc. In ATLA Aang talks about having friends all over the world before the war, so we know that air nomads did travel outside their own communities. I know that some real life groups of people have (unfortunately) been wiped out in their entirety, but not typically in one single event like Sozin's invasion. Tragic as it is, I find it easy to believe that the vast majority of them were killed. I've just found it hard to believe that there weren't little pockets of surviving air nomads scattered around the world in hiding. Anyway, what do you guys think? I hope you enjoyed the chapter.


	9. A Conversation He'd Rather Not Have

Zuko probably should have told someone about Azula. He should have told his uncle, who knew Azula well and could anticipate her movements, or at the very least Toph, whose job it was to handle matters of national security. But Zuko did neither. Uncle would just give him an enigmatic piece of advice he wasn’t ready to hear, and Toph, although unmatched in her bending ability, was a bit of a blabbermouth. That’s what Zuko told himself. 

Besides, it’s not like any of them could actually do anything about it. No one knew where Azula had gone, so Uncle’s cryptic wisdom and Toph’s rumor spreading could only inflame the situation. Zuko needed to keep a level head, and he was best able to do that alone. He would put together a small team of elite trackers to find Azula, of course, but more importantly, he needed to avoid inciting a nationwide panic, or worse: stirring up insurrection from Azula’s underground supporters. Yes, the more Zuko thought about it, the more he became convinced that it was unequivocally, undisputedly, without a doubt best to keep this tidbit of alarming information to himself. 

He found himself revisiting his conversation with Qin. _The Fire Nation won’t be the bad guys forever._ Zuko had imagined a war breaking out at least a decade from now, maybe longer. Against whom, he didn’t know, but based on current trends, the aggressor would most likely be Kuei and his behemoth of a bureaucracy. Zuko had imagined employing his military forces against it, whatever ‘it’ was, and proving to the world that the Fire Nation could come to the aid of those in need and fight for righteousness. 

Now, however, he had a much clearer idea of what ‘it’ was, and it wasn’t Kuei. _Would you really use military force against your own sister?_ Zuko asked himself, sounding suspiciously like Uncle. Well, yes, Zuko informed himself. But only if it comes to that. 

It was messier than Zuko would have hoped. He wanted a battle that plainly redeemed the Fire Nation. Fighting his own sister, an escaped lunatic who was just as Fire Nation as he was, wasn’t exactly the clean victory his nation needed right now. Azula was Fire Nation, but she wasn’t _the_ Fire Nation. Zuko was the Fire Nation. He could still employ his forces against a domestic terrorist (because, really, that’s what Azula had become) and come out the moral victor, right? Quashing whatever kind of rebellion Azula was undoubtedly planning would be an excellent demonstration of his good faith to the rest of the world. They might even forgive him for building secret weapons in open defiance of the treaty.

That’s what Zuko, who was, at the moment, seated in Qin’s office surrounded by blueprints for the most sophisticated military technology the world had ever seen, told himself. 

Qin donned a pair of eyeglasses and reviewed the paperwork one final time. Without taking his eyes off it, he announced, “With your approval, My Lord, we could begin the construction phase as early as tomorrow.” 

Zuko nodded. “In that case, you have my approval. That is, provided the project is kept secret, as we discussed.” 

“Of course. Information is dispersed on a need-to-know basis. The factory workers divide their labor using assembly-line style construction, so even the very people tasked with building the individual parts won’t have any concept of how they fit together as a whole. The only people who know the scope of this project in its entirety are sitting in this room.” 

Zuko gazed around the room. He and Qin were alone in it. 

“Very good. Let the construction begin.” With that, he and Qin shook hands and parted ways. They would meet again when their shared undertaking demanded it, but until that happened, Zuko found it was easiest to compartmentalize the various components of his life. So, as he walked back to his quarters, he pushed all thoughts of Qin, treaties, and secret military projects deep into the recesses of his mind. He couldn’t afford to have those thoughts migrate to the forefront while he was discussing something unrelated with someone who had no business knowing. How would he ever behave normally if that happened? It was a good thing he’d developed a reputation for behaving strangely, long before any of these clandestine dealings began. 

Speaking of people who had no business in Zuko’s private thoughts, Toph lurked outside Zuko’s office when he arrived. 

“Hey!” She shouted upon his arrival. She never did learn to use her inside voice. “I have a question about the—”

“Not now, Toph. I have other business to attend to.” Zuko shook his head and unlocked the door. 

“You always have business to attend to,” she pouted. 

“You would too, if you cared to do your job properly.” 

“Hey, you’re the one who hired me. You knew I was like this.” 

“I guess,” Zuko conceded. 

“But seriously, what’s up with you? You’ve been twitchy,” she pressed, following him through the threshold without asking. 

“I haven’t,” he replied twitchily. “Look, Toph, I really need you to go. I have an important chore to take care of.” He ushered her out the door and ended up shutting it in her face, even though that wasn’t entirely his intention to be so rude. It’s just that, well, he _did_ have a chore to take care of. He needed to steel himself for a very difficult conversation. 

Only ten minutes later Zuko was leaving the palace following a specific route to a specific destination he hadn’t visited in years. Despite this, he didn’t have to refresh his memory on how to get there. His feet knew the way on their own. Though he had not been there in years, there was a time in his life when he made this familiar journey nearly every day. His reasons for being there, back then, had always been pleasant. Now he had to resist the temptation to turn back when he rounded every corner. 

“Fire Lord Zuko,” Michi greeted when she opened the door. She said it levelly, all duty and no feeling. Zuko had to admit he was impressed. He didn’t know if he would have been able to keep the emotion out of his voice if their roles were reversed. 

“I thought we should talk. May I come in?” 

Of course Michi let him in. She could hardly refuse the fire lord, even if she wanted to. Zuko strongly suspected that she wanted to. 

The house was exactly as Zuko remembered it, even though Mai hadn’t lived there in years. Back when Zuko frequented it, Mai had been the only person living there. The rest of the family lived in their colonial estate in Omashu. 

Michi set about making tea for her impromptu visitor. It was an excuse not to look at him, Zuko realized. It probably also helped to have something to do with her hands.

When she couldn’t linger in the kitchen any longer, she brought the tea to him and sat on the opposite side of the table. She brought two cups. She poured some for him, but didn’t drink any herself. She settled into her chair, arms crossed protectively in front of herself. 

“I had nothing to do with it!” She blurted, “I swear, I didn’t even know about it! I didn’t know he was going to…” she trailed off on her own, which was fine. It’s not like they couldn’t both finish that sentence in their minds. 

Zuko held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I believe you, Michi. I’m not here to accuse you. I’m just here to talk.” 

“And what could we possibly have to talk ab—”

“Mom?” A voice interrupted from a nearby hallway. There stood a boy of about ten or eleven. Not just any boy, Zuko realized, it was Tom-Tom. Of course he’d grown up since Zuko had last seen him, it’s just that Zuko never really thought about it. He was closer to a teenager now than the toddler he was when Zuko and Mai had been together. 

“Tomlin, honey, not now. We have a very important visitor. Go to your room,” Michi urged. 

“Fire Lord Zuko?” Tom-Tom—no, _Tomlin_ , Michi had called him—turned his attention to Zuko, eyes wide with recognition. 

Zuko spoke up. “He can stay, if he prefers.” He smiled at Tomlin. “Would you like some tea?” He held aloft the unused cup that Michi had ostensibly brought for herself. Cautiously Tomlin approached, took the cup, then found a seat adjacent to his mother. 

“My dad tried to kill you,” Tomlin noted very seriously. 

“Yes. He did,” Zuko answered. If the boy was old enough to ponder these sorts of topics, then Zuko would do him the courtesy of treating him like an adult. Zuko remembered being eleven; he’d wanted more than anything to be taken seriously. 

“So then you’re probably mad at us?” Tomlin pushed. Still, his intonation was that of a question. 

“I’m upset with your father, yes. But you and your mother didn’t do anything wrong, so I’m not upset with you.” 

“But… he’s the patriarch of our family…” 

Tomlin wasn’t an idiot. He knew how Calderan noble families worked. Once a family was disgraced, they were ousted by the rest. Especially if that family had insulted the fire lord of all people. 

“Tomlin,” Zuko looked him steadily in the eyes. “When I was very young, I thought it was my duty to believe everything my father said and support him no matter what. But then I got older, and I saw that my father had hurt a lot of people. He hurt me.” Zuko unconsciously grazed his scar with his fingertips. “And that’s when I realized that nobody gets to choose their father. But everybody gets to choose how they live their own life. As long as you and your mother are good, honorable people, then I don’t care what your father did. You are not your father.” 

Tomlin held Zuko’s gaze and nodded while he was talking. He was very mature for his age, observant and pensive. 

“If we’re not under investigation, then what are you doing here?” Michi snapped. Royalty or not, her patience for Zuko’s unannounced presence was waning. 

“I’m here to check on you. I know this whole affair must have been very traumatic for you. Even more so than it has been for me.” 

Michi snorted. 

Zuko persisted, “I know I’m probably not who you want to see right now. But I’m asking you to consider that we’re on the same side. Ukano wronged me, but in doing so, he wronged you as well. There’s no way he didn’t know his actions would be detrimental to his family. Besides… We were family once. I want you to be okay. Both of you.” He added, glancing at Tomlin. 

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Tomlin addressed him with a proper bow. 

“Call me Zuko.” 

“Thank you, Zuko,” Tomlin corrected. Zuko smiled encouragingly at him. 

“You’re probably very busy. I’ll see you to the door so you can be on your way,” Michi announced, rising from her chair. Fine, whatever. Zuko could take a hint. 

At the door, Michi pulled him in for a hug. He was taken aback, until the real reason for it became clear. She whispered in his ear, low enough that Tomlin couldn’t hear her, and asked, “My husband. Are you going to execute him?” 

“It’s not my call. The fire sages will decide,” Zuko whispered back. When Michi said nothing, he added, “I’m not pushing for it. I don’t want to see your family ripped apart over this.” 

“Trust me, it already has been,” Michi said, then patted him on the back as if she’d said something tender and loving. 

They pulled out of the hug and she regarded him warmly. Zuko played along for Tomlin’s sake. He didn’t know if Ukano would die, but he didn’t need to put the boy through any more hardship. 

Zuko returned to the palace, his thoughts even heavier than when he’d left.


	10. A Million-Gold-Piece Idea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jian's job search gets more desperate.

“My life I give to my country. With my hands I fight for Fire Lord Zuko and our forefathers before him. With my mind I seek ways to better my country. And with my feet may our March of Civilization continue,” the class recited in dreary unison. 

“Very good!” The recruiter beamed at the group. “But in order to make it in the competitive world of mechanical engineering, you’ll need to know a little more than just the Fire Nation Oath.” 

The class laughed. He was right, and they were prepared to demonstrate that they were the best and brightest. 

Jian raised her hand. 

“What are we… fighting for?” She asked, without waiting to have been called on. 

“Excuse me?” The recruiter (Jian couldn’t recall his name) addressed her. He wasn’t offended, really. Just surprised. He seemed genuinely intrigued by her question.

“You know,” Jian elaborated, her pointed index fingers circling each other in a cyclical gesture, “I mean, like, the war is over, you know? So who are we fighting? And the ‘March of Civilization’ is what Fire Lord Sozin dubbed his campaign, so like… why do we still say that same oath?” 

“Hmm,” the recruiter tapped his chin delicately. “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘who’ we are fighting, but rather, of ‘what’ we’re fighting.” 

Jian crossed her arms, dissatisfied. “Okay. ‘What’ are we fighting, then?” 

The recruiter laughed a deep, hearty chuckle. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you? I like that.” He crossed the room over to her and leaned against the empty desk adjacent to hers. “I think it’s ignorance we’re fighting. Sure, the war is over, but that doesn’t mean that progress is over. The ‘March of Civilization’ will always continue, even if it’s not in the form Fire Lord Sozin envisioned. There are always technological developments to be made, qualities of life to uplift, knowledge to uncover…  _ that’s  _ the real March of Civilization. And each and every one of you is perfectly poised to make that kind of progress. It’s not about war. Not anymore. It’s about imagining a better future and making that future a reality.” 

“Huh,” Jian considered. She always thought that Fire Lord Zuko simply forgot to update the national oath. 

“What’s your name?” The recruiter asked, extending a hand to shake in her direction. 

“Jianling Du Tang. I-I go by Jian.” 

“Jian,” he repeated, winking at her good-naturedly. Jian suddenly became aware that he was only a few years older than she was. “I’m excited to see what your future has in store, Jian.” 

When he made his way back to the front of the room, several of Jian’s nearby classmates giggled awkwardly. Jian pretended not to notice. 

“So?” He addressed the class at large, arms outstretched in an invitational sort of way. “A better future. What does that look like?” 

No one dared volunteer.

“C’mon! Anyone! There are no wrong answers,” the recruiter prodded. 

Shen, a classmate of Jian’s renown for his firebending ability, cautiously raised his hand. 

“I heard that in Ba Sing Se they have public trains powered by earthbending. Maybe we could implement something like that here in the Caldera, except powered by electricity instead,” he offered. 

“Brilliant!” The recruiter boomed. “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Anyone else? Surely you clever engineering students have some other good ideas.” 

Yori, a student Jian had once partnered with in a chemistry lab, was the next to raise her hand. 

“I crunched some numbers, and I think that standard passenger airships could be much more fuel-efficient if we added propellers on top,” Yori suggested. 

“Wonderful! These are some fantastic ideas. I’ll bet the rest of you have some million-gold-piece ideas too, even if you’re too shy to admit it,” the recruiter declared, catching Jian’s eye on that last bit. She gulped. 

Did she have any million-gold-piece ideas? She could easily identify what was wrong with the world, sure. But solutions were few and far between. She wished she could engineer a job opening somewhere. 

\------

_ The clock is officially ticking,  _ Jian thought, standing alongside her peers at graduation. Their thoughts were all celebratory in nature, probably, but not Jian’s. All Jian could think about was that damned clock. Three-hundred and sixty-four days and twenty-three hours… 

Who was she kidding? She’d probably end up jobless and married to some well-to-do idiot. Maybe that guy from that night she’d fought with her mother. Gongzi? Genzu? He wasn’t so bad, but having his horrible mother as an in-law would be another matter. 

Maybe she was just delaying the inevitable. Maybe she should just submit herself to a match now, and hope her husband would let her get a job later. Maybe this was all just a delusion to keep her self-esteem afloat. She ran her thumb along the ribbon binding her diploma, wondering if, years from now, she would look back on this day as the first or the last day of her life. Her  _ real  _ life. 

Maybe she would get a job at a ramen shop. Her mother never said that she couldn’t, only that she couldn’t  _ end up _ working in a ramen shop. She just wanted to know what it felt like. 

Fire Lord Zuko himself gave a speech at the ceremony, for some reason. He certainly hadn’t graduated from school here. Jian read somewhere that he was forced to quit his studies at age thirteen. He probably didn’t know the first thing about engineering. It was all just pomp. 

His speech was offensively boring. Blah blah blah the bright future of the Fire Nation’s next generation blah blah blah the impressive credentials of a Caldera City University education. He threw in some shit about the vital importance of mechanical engineering to human endeavor for good measure.  _ If that’s true, then why did you gut the royal war technologies initiative?  _ Jian pondered bitterly. Come to think of it, she wished she had graduated fifteen years earlier, under Fire Lord Ozai’s regime. There was no shortage of opportunities for young engineers back then. World peace just didn’t pay the bills. 

Surely engineering still had its practical applications in peacetime. Like designing electricity-powered public transit in the Caldera, or adding propellers to airships. Except that those were Shen’s and Yori’s ideas. Not hers. A million-gold-piece idea… 

Truthfully, Jian has hundreds of ideas. It’s just that none of them were particularly useful, or realistic for that matter. She just wanted some time to tinker around in a laboratory without assignments or deadlines, was that too much to ask? She just wanted some time to allow her personal style to evolve. 

She was so screwed. She would go home tonight and draft as many résumés as possible. She might even distribute them, if she had time. Sure, most businesses wouldn’t open until sunrise, but her résumé would be waiting on the doorstep when they did. 

“Jian!” Yori called, trotting up beside her. 

“Yori! Hey…” Jian offered, trying to disguise her inner misery. 

“A bunch of us are going out for dinner to celebrate, wanna come?” 

“Oh, I—”

“C’mon,” Yori protested, even though Jian hadn’t even put up a proper fight yet. “We all worked really hard this year.”

“Yeah, and we’re gonna have to work a lot harder next year if we want to get a job in this economy,” Jian spat. She hadn’t meant to let her bitterness creep into her conversation with Yori, and yet, there it was. 

Yori looked unexpectedly pensive. 

“You’re right. We are,” she admitted. “But not tonight. Tonight we get to take a step back and admire everything we’ve accomplished so far. Jian, you’ll have the rest of your life to work yourself to death. Besides, this is probably the last time we’ll have the gang all together.” 

That hadn’t occurred to Jian. She had been too consumed by her own sense of impending doom to notice that she might actually miss some of her classmates. Sudden guilt gripped her by the chest. 

“Okay, I’ll go,” Jian agreed. 

A bowl of spicy short rib ramen and several hours of conversation later, and Jian felt lighter. 

“Wait!” Jian announced to her companions when they were midway out the door. They paused to affix her with their questioning glances. “I think I left something inside. You guys go. I’ll catch up.” 

When the group was safely outside, Jian meandered back inside. A busser was collecting their used chopsticks and making stacks of their mostly-empty bowls. His eyes flickered upwards when she reentered. 

“Forget something?” He asked, customer-service-like. 

“No. I, um. Are you guys hiring?” She stammered. Eloquent, Jian. Very Eloquent. 

“I don’t know. I’ll ask my supervisor. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and drop off a résumé?” He shrugged.

Jian nodded. 

“I will,” she promised. “Thanks,” she added, an afterthought. 

\-------

That night, Jian went home and penned fifty copies of her résumé. She would drop them off everywhere she could first thing the next morning. 


	11. Déjà Vu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And we're back to the air nomad village. This one might feel familiar.

“Well?” Rima inquired. As if she didn’t already know what he’d say. 

“It’s amazing!” He replied in between bites. “Tastes like home. Are you sure you guys aren’t from the Southern Air Temple?” 

She shook her head fondly. “Northern. Pretty darned sure.” 

“Mmm,” he contemplated, licking clean the spoon he’d been eating with. “Even still. Delicious.” 

It wasn’t his first time in the bakery. In fact, he’d taken to stopping by daily in the few weeks he had been here. How strange it was to think that it had been in this very room where she and Sister Sonam had hidden from him when he first arrived. He was an outsider then. He still was, technically, but he wasn’t just any outsider. He was an airbender. Moreover, he was Rima’s friend. _When_ , Rima wondered, _had he stopped being ‘the outsider’ and started being just Aang?_

“Not that I’ve ever been,” Rima added, pulling herself out of her reverie. Aang had been all over the world. He told her so. She made a conscious decision to not be jealous of him and instead just soak up all the information she could, like a sponge. He offered it freely, too. Aang was brimming with colorful tales. 

“One day I’ll take you there. You’ll love it. A group of Earth Kingdom refugees live there now. They’ve really adapted to the lifestyle. They even built flying machines that don’t require airbending!” 

“You weren’t upset that outsiders took over?” Rima turned her head sharply. 

Aang laughed his signature contagious laugh. “No way! I mean, a little, at first. But then I realized that there are no outsiders. There are only people.” 

No outsiders. Only people. Maybe that’s why Rima had stopped thinking of him as an outsider before she knew it. He never thought of himself as one. Maybe that’s why Rima liked him so much. 

Aang chattered on, oblivious to the conundrum swirling around in Rima’s mind. “You’ll understand when you see it. The people there are really kind, and resilient. It’s hard not to have respect for everything they’ve accomplished.” 

“I’m sure that’s true,” Rima acknowledged. After a pause, she added, “But… we’re just talking, right?” 

“Huh?” There was a bit of custard on the tip of Aang’s nose. He didn’t seem to notice. 

“We’re just talking. I mean, I could never actually go with you to the Northern Air Temple.” 

“Why not?” Aang stared at her. In his grey eyes was equal parts invitation and challenge. 

“You know why…” Rima demurred. 

“It’s safe now. I promise. Don’t you trust me?” 

“I do,” she answered, truthfully. “But that doesn’t mean I trust everyone else. The world is so big, and there are so many people in it…” 

“Which is exactly why you need to get out there and see it! What are you supposed to do, stay here forever?” 

“I don’t see why not! That’s what my ancestors have been doing for over a hundred years. They all turned out just fine.” 

Aang shook his head. He gazed slightly over her shoulder, as if he could see something she couldn’t. “That’s no life. And it’s a different world out there than the one your ancestors knew.” 

Rima stewed on that for a short while. Aang was so confident, even when he made wild, unsupported claims about the nature of the entire world. Rima would never understand how he did it. 

“You know, Sister Sonam thinks you’re just trying to lure me into the outside world to cause trouble.” 

“Sister Sonam is just worried about you. Besides, don’t tell her I said this, but she could really use a vacation,” Aang countered. Rima chortled. Sister Sonam _did_ need a vacation. 

“Hypothetically…” Rima started, casting aside her good judgement in favor of Aang’s magnetic personality. Again. 

“Hypothetically,” Aang repeated dutifully. 

“If I were to travel outside the village with you, where would you take me?” 

Aang grinned. “Well, the Northern Air Temple, obviously.” 

“Obviously. Then where?” 

Aang tapped his chin. “The Southern Air Temple, maybe. And while we’re down there, you’d have to meet my friends in the Southern Water Tribe.” 

“But that’s on the other side of the world!” 

“It’s no trouble with Appa! And we could make a trip out of it. Stop by Ba Sing Se and see Toph. Or wait, I heard Toph was living in the Fire Nation now… Oh well. We could just visit her there, and see Zuko while we’re at it.” 

Rima couldn’t recall exactly which of Aang’s many friends Toph was, but the name Zuko rang a bell. 

“Zuko. He’s…” 

“The fire lord. Yeah!” 

Rima made a face. 

“It’s safe now, really. I wouldn’t take you there if it wasn’t.” 

“I know, it’s just… well this is all hypothetical anyway.” Rima folded her arms around herself like a shawl. 

And it was just hypothetical. Right?

\---------

The elders didn’t take kindly to Aang in the beginning, and why would they? He entered the village a total stranger, claiming that the outside world was completely safe, and beckoning them all to join him. The only reason he wasn’t exiled was because he’d demonstrated that he was, beyond all doubt, a real airbender. No one knew what to make of that. Why would an airbender advocate for his own people’s destruction? 

“Perhaps he works for the Fire Nation. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and so he made friends there,” Sister Dichen mused at the village meeting. No one had any reason to suspect him of that, necessarily, but then again, they also didn’t have any evidence to the contrary. 

His response shocked them all. 

“I do have friends in the Fire Nation! I have friends all over the world. I’ve known the fire lord for the better part of a decade.” 

“Then you admit it! You’ve sold out your own people to please your Fire Nation friends,” the elders charged. 

But no matter what accusations came his way, Aang insisted that there was no harm. His story was unbelievable. After one hundred long years of fighting, the war was suddenly over, and their entire village didn’t get the memo. It was nonsense. 

Aang didn’t seem to mind. He never angered or pleaded with them. He just smiled, telling them that they simply weren’t ready, and that was okay. Maybe they would never be ready. That was okay too. Aang just wanted to pass along the happy news and stay for an extended vacation. 

Sister Sonam advised Rima not to speak to Aang directly. So, naturally, that’s exactly what she did. Her curiosity was insurmountable. 

“I work at the bakery, if you’d ever like to stop by…” Rima offered, after encountering him ‘accidentally’ at the village square. 

His face brightened. “I’d love to! Say, you wouldn’t happen to have custard pies there, would you?” 

“We would, actually. I make them myself.” Rima offered a shy smile. 

“Well that’s an offer I can’t refuse. You said your name was Rima?” 

“Rima,” she confirmed, her smile broadening. 

That was how it began. Their peculiar little friendship. 

Rima, along with the rest of the village, quickly learned just how charismatic Aang could be. It wasn’t long before he was well-liked, even if he was something of an oddity no one could explain. 

He regaled everyone with stories of his travels all across the world. Rima learned of people and places she never even knew existed. Still, Aang never provided the information Rima _really_ wanted. When she finally felt that she could count him as a proper friend, she dared ask. 

“How did your people escape?” She inquired one day when they lounged about the hillsides doing nothing in particular. 

“Excuse me?” He tried to keep his manner nonchalant, but he knew. Rima could tell. 

“Well, clearly at least a few people escaped the Southern Air Temple. Or you wouldn’t be here today.” 

Aang opened his mouth and then closed it several times. Finally, with his face twisted into a caricature of deep contemplation, he answered. 

“You know how your village elders aren’t ready to explore the outside world, even though there would be no harm in it?” 

Rima nodded. 

“Well, that’s how I am about the Southern Air Temple. I’m just not ready to talk about it.” 

That was fair. Rima had no choice but to accept it. Not that it would stop her from prodding him in other ways. 

“How did you find us?” She asked on a separate occasion. This time around she was teaching Aang how to whip the pastry cream with airbending. Aang had been foolish enough to admit it was a technique he never mastered. Rima set about righting that wrong immediately. 

Aang chuckled, “I told you. I wasn’t looking for you guys. It just happened. I didn’t even know there were any other airbenders left alive.” 

“So then what were you doing out here?” Rima pressed, dissatisfied. 

Aang paused to formulate his answer. 

“I’ve spent the last few years traveling to the most remote, impoverished villages around the world. The people living in those kinds of places were hit the hardest by the war. They weren’t on the front lines, of course, but their economies all but collapsed. Wartime taxes drained them, and all the war reparation efforts seemed to forget they exist. Someone had to help them, and that someone might as well be me.” 

Rima didn’t know much about taxes or economies. Her village preferred the barter system over establishing any kind of currency. So she clung to the piece of Aang’s statement that she did understand. “So that’s what this place is to you? A remote, impoverished village?” 

“No!” Aang corrected quickly. “I never expected to find a place like this. I never thought somewhere so lively and beautiful could exist in such a hidden pocket of the world. Maybe that’s why I can’t bring myself to leave.” 

For some reason, she believed him. She believed nearly everything he said. Nearly. 

\-------

There was something Aang wasn’t telling her. She wasn’t sure what, but she was certain there was something. His tales were too cheery. His answers were too simple. He was just too perfect. Rima refused to be made a fool of. Perhaps Sister Sonam had been right all along. 

She went straight to his tent after Sister Sonam dismissed her from the bakery for the day. The sun was setting, but it wasn’t quite down yet. There was still time to get the truth. 

“Aang!” She shouted, pacing outside the entrance. The taut fabric provided nowhere to knock. 

“Rima?” He answered, peeking his head out. “I didn’t expect you to—”

“Can I come in?” She demanded, because that’s what it was, really. It wasn’t a question. 

“Yeah.” He held the tent flap aloft for her. “Is something wrong?” 

And suddenly Rima couldn’t speak. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to cry, scream, or turn around and never ask the question she needed to ask. 

“Rima?” 

“What aren’t you telling me?” She croaked. 

“What—”

“Please. You like me, don’t you? You care about me?” 

“Of course I do.” Aang sat opposite her, cross-legged. His wide eyes informed her that she had his full attention. 

“Then respect me enough to tell me the truth. There’s something you’ve left out of all your stories. All the air nomads were murdered over one hundred years ago, except for the ancestors who founded my village, and apparently, your ancestors too, and… what? You’ve been the only airbender living out in the open your entire life? And nobody tried to hurt you? Do you not have a family, or a monastic order you belong to? You can’t just… exist! No in the world that I know. You have to come from somewhere, and there has to be some reason you survived the war living out there in the open. What aren’t you telling me?” 

Rima closed her eyes. She prayed Sister Sonam and the elders hadn’t been right about him. If he really was a Fire Nation spy out to plot their destruction, then Rima’s heart might just break. She’d grown so fond of him during his stay… 

When she opened her eyes again, she saw that Aang was on the brink of tears. His face was blotchy and red, and he stared down at the ground instead of meeting her gaze. 

“Just tell me. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than the pain of not knowing.” 

Rima was so, so tired of not knowing things. 

“I’m the avatar. My ancestors didn’t escape the Southern Air Temple. I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hmmm Aang not telling people he's the avatar? It's almost like we've seen that before...


	12. Give Me a Reason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko receives a mysterious letter. Now he's gotta see what that's all about.

Zuko eyes darted down the page one more time, just to be sure. The letter had to be a prank, or a forgery, or  _ something,  _ but Zuko still hadn’t ascertained exactly which. Or why, for that matter. 

He scrutinized the handwriting, which was genuinely Aang’s as far as he could tell. He tried reading it backwards to see if it contained any secret messages. When that revealed nothing, he read just the first word of every sentence for the same reason. Then the last word of each sentence. Then it held it aloft to a candle flame to see if any hidden images would emerge. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. 

It could be an ambush. In fact, it had to be an ambush. Someone, who was doing a damned good job of imitating Aang’s writing style, wanted to lure him out into the middle of nowhere, presumably to kill him and then discard his body in the remote and treacherous mountain ranges of the northern Earth Kingdom.

Zuko had no trouble imagining why someone might want him dead. Plenty of people did. Take Ukano, for example. No, that wasn’t what was getting him. What got him was how elaborate this setup was, how preposterous its premise. If someone wanted to kill him, surely there was a method easier than this. Surely they could come up with a more believable lie. 

Of course Zuko considered Azula. Motive for wanting to kill him? Check. Plausible reason to be living out in the middle of nowhere far away from the Fire Nation? Also check. It’s just that this wasn’t Azula’s style. Azula was, historically speaking, smoother than this. She could spew reasonable, airtight lies without having to think about it. She knew that the best lies were also the simplest, because real life was frequently simpler than most people realize. But this—this absurd, roundabout story, chock-full of plotholes and unanswered questions—this just couldn’t be the work of the Azula that Zuko knew. 

Perhaps she was slipping. Her mental health had clearly declined by the end of the war, and only continued to steadily do so in the years since. But even in her fits of madness, she was still an expert at what she did best: namely, firebending and manipulating people. Still, she had been in that institution so many years, and even Azula had her limits. 

Yes, that it was it, then. This was the work of a desperate, untreated, mentally-ill Azula. It had to be. Because if it wasn’t… well, what? Zuko was supposed to believe that there actually was a secret village of air nomad survivors nestled in the jagged mountains of the northern Earth Kingdom? And that they had evaded the Fire Nation military forces for the past century? It was ridiculous. 

_ Stranger things have happened…  _ Zuko thought, and memories of an electric blue pillar of light shooting upwards from the Southern Water Tribe flooded his mind. If you told him back then that the avatar had survived the past hundred years frozen in ice, he would have thought that was ridiculous, too. 

The worst part was that it didn’t matter. Whether the letter really was from Aang and his crazy tale was true, or whether this was Azula’s most recent attempt to lure him into a shallow grave had zero influence on what he would do next. Either way he had no choice but to investigate. And either way he would have to keep quiet about it until he gathered more information. 

Zuko sighed. It felt like he’d just gotten home, and now he would have to pack a bag again. 

\-------

In hindsight, Rima realized it was probably silly to expect a palanquin to emerge through the treeline. Maybe a royal procession was more realistic. What would it look like? Would there be uniformed guards? Would it have been clear they came in peace? 

Never in her wildest dreams, however, did she imagine that they would arrive in the air. The gasps and murmurs that broke out in the gathered crowd made evident that she wasn’t alone. 

“They can  _ fly?” _ She demanded, turning to Aang at her left. 

“Ah, yeah. That’s a fairly recent development though,” he admitted. He tugged at the collar of his robe with an outstretched arm, like he was embarrassed about it. 

Aang was surely the only person in the crowd with the capacity to feel anything but terror. Somehow he’d done it. He’d convinced the elders that their strict isolation was no longer necessary, even that it inhibited them, and that they would all be better off if they agreed to at least meet the fire lord and hear what he had to say. What he could possibly say to persuade them to turn their backs on the way they’d been living for over a hundred years was beyond Rima. 

Maybe it wouldn’t even matter. Maybe that flying ship would bring with it their destruction when it landed. 

The elders made the difficult decision to trust Aang upon learning that he was the avatar. They wanted to know why he’d chosen to hide it from them for so long, of course, but his answer wasn’t what they expected. It didn’t arouse any suspicion at all. It was too depressing for that. 

“It was selfish of me,” Aang boldly confessed. “I did it because I liked it here. It’s been over one hundred years since I’ve even seen another airbender, let alone a whole village, and this place… it felt like home. I didn’t want to stand out here. I just wanted to fit in. I wanted to forget that I was the avatar and just enjoy my time here.” 

He was earnest and apologetic. He emphasized that it was his duty as the avatar to keep everyone safe. 

“I wouldn’t ask this of you if I wasn’t confident that you wouldn’t be harmed. As the avatar, I’m tasked with maintaining the balance between the four nations. And that’s just it. They’re meant to be four. The world is out of balance right now, but if they knew you existed, then you could begin to rebuild!” 

“We have rebuilt. You would have us leave everything we’ve built behind,” Monk Yonten snapped. 

“The home you’ve built here is beautiful, and I understand why you wouldn’t want to leave it. But balance can’t be restored until you live out in the open. Airbenders are supposed to be nomads! We’re not meant to live cooped up in a tiny village, living in fear. You deserve freedom, and now we finally live in a world that can give it to you,” he paused and collected his thoughts. “Listen, the decision is entirely yours. I won’t do anything without your consent. If you wish, I’ll leave right now and never breathe a word of this place to anyone. But as the avatar, I strongly advise you to give the new world a chance.” 

It was pretty difficult to refute the spiritual authority of the avatar, but perhaps the enticing prospect of freedom was what did it. Even the elders, who were largely too old and frail to travel the world on their gliders, craved life without their current confines. None of them, except for Aang, were old enough to remember the old days. They had only heard about their ancestors’ carefree lifestyle through stories. But now, here it was, dangling in front of them. It was so close they could taste it. 

So they sat down and drafted a letter to the fire lord. Aang traveled into town and used one of the Earth Kingdom village’s messenger hawks to send it. Now, after the agonizing wait for his response, and then the second subsequent wait for his arrival, here he was. 

As the ship drew nearer, Rima instinctively reached out for Aang’s hand and gripped it, hard. Her nails dug into his palm, and there’s no way it didn’t hurt. But he kept his expression friendly and placid for her sake. 

The ship was smaller than Rima expected, now that she could properly see it. In fact it was really just a cloth balloon with a basket attached to the base. In the basket was just one man. 

When the ship touched down, Rima could finally see him clearly. He was unmistakably Fire Nation, but also shabbily dressed and travel-weary.  _ That’s the fire lord?  _ Maybe he’d sent an ambassador in his stead. 

“Zuko!” Aang called, breaking free of Rima’s grip and nearing the strange balloon-ship. The man inside—the fire lord—turned his gaze upward, then out at the crowd. He tried to keep his eyes on Aang, but Rima got the impression he couldn’t help but take in the sight that was the village. 

“So,” The fire lord announced, stepping out of the basket, “This is actually real, huh?” 

\-------

“...and that is why the Fire Lord stands before you today, on behalf of his people, swearing on his honor that the world is once again safe for airbenders to live openly and freely!” Aang entreated, his voice booming within the confines of the temple. It was a good speech. Zuko could give him that. There was just one problem. 

“Aang?” 

“Yeah? Did you write a speech, too? By all means,” Aang stepped aside, gesturing for Zuko to take his place front and center. 

“No. Can I, um, talk to you for a second?” 

“Sure!” Aang didn’t budge. Zuko scanned the attentive faces of the air nomads gathered in the crowd. 

“Alone?” 

“Oh. Right.” Aang led the way into the adjacent corridor. 

“What’s on your mind?” Aang prodded. His eager smile didn’t falter. 

“Don’t you think this is all a little, how do I say this… much? And fast?” Zuko suggested lightly. 

“Fast! I’ve been living here for a while now, you know.” 

Zuko shook his head. “That’s no time at all compared to the last hundred years. Aang, what if these people aren’t ready to see how much the world has changed in that time? What if the world isn’t ready for them?” 

“The world wasn’t really ready for me, either, but it managed. Plus, the world is safe now! Your father is in prison and you would never hurt an airbender!” 

“Right, but, my father still has supporters, you know. They keep their opinions to themselves these days, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.” 

“My people can’t stay hidden forever. That’s no way to live. Besides, why would your father’s supporters even want to kill them? It’s not like they’re searching for the avatar. They know who I am!” 

Zuko sighed. Aang had decent counterpoints for every argument Zuko made, but still, something bothered him. The world should have been safe by now, but it just wasn’t. Not when Azula could escape and manage to go unnoticed for this long. What kind of world was that to bring this fledgling community of air nomads into? 

Aang was staring at him. He tilted his head slightly to the side. 

“C’mon, Zuko. I know you’re nervous, but this is the right thing to do. This could change the course of history for the better! I know you’ll make sure the Fire Nation is a safe place for them. I trust you.” 

Aang trusted him. But should he? Zuko couldn’t exactly admit that Azula was on the loose. Not now. He would just have to double down on his search efforts. 

Aang’s faith in him was flattering, and a bit overwhelming. Surely Zuko could control his own people well enough to prevent another genocide, couldn’t he? The military answered to Zuko and Zuko only, and nobody else had access to those kinds of resources. And if not in pursuit of the avatar, what reason would anyone from the Fire Nation want to kill the air nomad survivors? Aang made a valid point. 

_ But Azula isn’t rational. She doesn’t need a reason. _

Zuko forced a smile. He could take care of whatever unsavory business Azula might bring about behind the scenes, before anyone even noticed. He would just have to ensure it. He didn’t have a choice. 

“I won’t let you down.” 


	13. Sad, But Not Too Sad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rima gets the adventure she's been dying for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year!

When Tashi and the other ambassadors returned, Rima peppered him with questions about his journey. 

“It’s the strangest feeling,” Tashi confessed, taking care to place his words. “It’s like everyone is staring at you, and yet no one knows who you are. It’s like feeling naked and invisible at the same time.”

Rima had other questions, of course. Questions about the town, the people, and whether he saw any earthbenders. “Quaint,” “Nice,” and “No,” Tashi answered each, respectively. Unsurprisingly, Tashi had a few questions of his own.

“So… the new guy?” 

“Avatar Aang,” Rima nodded. 

“He’s an outsider,” Tashi carried on. It wasn’t a question, but it felt like one. 

“I mean, kind of. He’s an air nomad.” 

“But he’s not from here.” 

Rima giggled. “Well, no. I think we would know if the avatar was from here.” 

“And everyone likes him? Even the elders?” 

“They do,” Rima affirmed. And in spite of Tashi’s initial skepticism, it was only a matter of time before he too liked Aang. Everyone did. 

Rima had to remind herself of that sometimes, that she liked Aang, and moreover that she trusted him. Like when Aang promised to take her all around the world to see all the magnificent sights he’d seen. And again when he actually did it. 

It wasn’t just Rima, of course. A handful of representatives were chosen from the village to ‘be the faces of the air nomad survivors.’ It wasn’t unlike the ambassadors chosen to venture into the nearby Earth Kingdom town, except that this time they would be travelling much, much farther, and they wouldn’t try to lay low at all. To be noticed was the entire point of the journey. 

“You want to look somber, but still hopeful,” the fire lord said when he coached her before her first public appearance. Rima contorted her face into an expression she thought fit the bill. 

“Not sad enough. You’re the direct descendant of genocide survivors, remeber? You need to look more melancholic. No, not like that. That’s too sad. You still have hope for the future, right? No, don’t smile. Look sad, but keep that hopeful glimmer in your eyes. There. Yeah. Close enough.” He’d appraised her one last time before practically shoving her onto the stage that awaited.

She wasn’t sure why she had been fussed over so much. She hardly said a word, and neither did any of her fellow villagers. Aang and the fire lord did most of the talking. Aang recounted the tale of how he encountered their far-flung village in the first place, and how meeting Rima’s people had imbued him with the optimism that the four nations could once again be four. The fire lord, conversely, spoke mostly of the past. He talked about learning from the mistakes of his ancestors, and how this was his nation’s crucial opportunity for redemption, in which its actions would determine the future of the entire world. 

All of this fate-of-the-planet stuff was a bit much for Rima, and she found herself grateful that she wasn’t expected to say anything. She just stood and smiled, allowing the audience to behold her. Except she didn’t smile that much. No, no; she was supposed to look sad, but not too sad. Whatever that meant. 

The faces of the audience changed with each new locale they visited, but their expressions generally stayed the same. They all looked at her in slack-jawed disbelief. She had the impression they weren’t even listening to anything Aang or the fire lord had to say. All of their energy seemed focused on her and the other representatives, drinking in their presence so thirstily it seemed they were afraid it was all just a mirage. Tashi’s words rang out in Rima’s head.  _ Like being naked and invisible at the same time. _ She hadn’t really understood at the time, but she certainly did now. 

Her public appearances were undoubtedly the worst part of the trip, but it wasn’t all bad. Aang made good on his promise to show her all of his favorite sights in each city they visited. Together, they did all kinds of things Rima never thought she could do. They surfed on the backs of giant koi in Kyoshi, they misappropriated Omashu’s mail delivery system for recreational purposes, and rode an earthbending-powered train in Ba Sing Se. Their excursions tested the limits of Rima’s bravery, none more so than visiting Caldera City. It took all the courage she could muster just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

“What do you think? Beautiful, isn’t it?” Aang urged, matching her brisk pace. He really could find beauty anywhere. 

Rima gazed around. “It’s… red.” 

“It really is!” He laughed. Either he missed her sarcasm, or he just pretended not to hear it. (Probably the latter). 

Suddenly it was too much. The sad-but-not-too-sad-and-a-little-bit-hopeful mask she had been wearing for weeks now had shattered. She ran, but where, she didn’t know. The side streets and alleyways of this strange city were just as alien as everything else. Everything except the tiny village she desperately wished she could return to in that moment. She was a fool to think she ever could have handled leaving it. 

“Hey! Rima, wait!” Aang called after her. At least, he’d said something to that effect. Taking in her surroundings was not at the top of Rima’s priority list.

Aang tried to follow her, but got lost somewhere in an onslaught of dragon moose-drawn carriages, wagons, and pedestrians. The Fire Nation bystanders did nothing as she pushed her way through their masses to take shelter behind a foul-smelling trash bin. 

She bundled the folds of her robe between her knees and cried into them. Dimly, she wondered if the fabric blocked the sound from carrying into the street behind her, but she really didn’t care. She just sobbed the ugly, guttural cries that she needed to release. 

She startled when she felt a firm hand on her shoulder, but felt a modicum of relief when she saw the pale blue arrow on it. 

“Leave me alone,” she muttered through the bundle of cloth. 

“Rima, just tell me what’s wrong,” Aang soothed, but Rima felt anything but calm. She’d felt a lot of things through the whirlwind that was the past couple of weeks, but never had she felt angry with Aang. Until now, that is. In fact, she was furious. How could he be so obtuse? 

“What’s wrong? Are you serious?? What’s wrong is that I trusted you so much that I left the safety of my village to go around the entire world, undoing all the hard work my ancestors did to ensure that we stayed hidden, and for what? To end up in the Fire Nation capital? Surrounded by firebenders? The people who committed genocide against mine?? That’s what's wrong!” 

Aang looked as much like a kicked puppy as a full-grown man possibly could. 

“I thought you trusted me…” He managed. 

“I do! That’s the problem! Don’t you get it? I trust you, and you trust everybody else, including the entire Fire Nation, and somewhere along the way that trust has to break down. There’s just no way that everyone is as honest and nice as you are!” She lowered her voice. “These people are firebenders, Aang. Firebenders! My people—our people!—got murdered because they were stupid, and honest, and trusting, and nice!” 

Aang was stunned into a pensive silence for several moments. When he broke it, it wasn’t with words. 

From the corner of her eye, Rima saw a warm flickering light reflecting off of Aang’s orange cloak. He noticed her notice it, and held his palm aloft to give her a better view of the tiny flame dancing in his hand. 

“I’m a firebender, too, you know.” 

Rima rolled her eyes. She drew her knees closer into her chest. “You don’t count.” 

Aang inched closer, neither of them caring that they sat on filthy cobblestone. 

“Why not?” 

“Because!” She gestured wildly at nothing in particular. “You’re the avatar!” 

“Exactly. As the avatar, it’s my job to promote peace and prosperity for all people. All of them. Even these ones.” With a tilt of his head he pointed to the bustling city around them. 

“That only means anything if they’re as committed to peace as you are.” 

“And are they?” 

Rima huffed. “I don’t know, you tell me!” 

Aang shook his head. “No, they’ll tell you themselves. But only if you give them the chance.” 

Rima took a deep breath. And then another. And then another after that, for good measure. How did Aang always manage to make everything seem so reasonable?

“Okay,” she finally conceded. 

Aang stood, and extended his hand for her to take. She reached for it, but hesitated. 

“On one condition,” she specified. 

He raised a wry eyebrow. “And what might that be?” 

“Tell the fire lord that I want to give a speech this time. I’m tired of standing around and letting you two do all the talking.” 

He grinned. “I’ll tell him.” 

Rima took his hand. 

\-------

This time the airbender girl gave a speech. Curious, as none of the reports of her prior appearances indicated that she’d spoken before. Her speech was nothing remarkable, of course. Just the same predictable drabble they’d all been spewing about world peace and second chances and whatever. 

Azula always knew her brother was a moron, but he’d really outdone himself this time. First he’d let his guard down enough to allow her to escape, then he’d delivered an entire village of airbenders right to her on a silver platter, and now he was too stupid to notice her standing in the audience not even one hundred yards away.


	14. Hindsight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko's in Fire Lord timeout.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will this story ever have a regular posting schedule? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Probably not.

Zuko heard the sound before he’d had the chance to properly wake up.  _ It was like a swoosh, _ his sleep-addled mind informed him.  _ Or maybe it was more like a whisssh. _ Whatever it was, it was bad news. Zuko rose from his bed, slipped on a robe, and made his way over to the door. 

“Toph!” He screeched, only now remembering that she’d taken to bending his bedroom door away during the night. 

“It’s for your own protection,” She’d told him, and he could hardly disagree after the palace servants had found him sleepwalking in the garden with his dao swords in hand. He still didn’t like it. 

He especially disliked it now, when he was wide awake and was absolutely certain he’d heard a sound. He pounded on the stone wall with his fists to no avail. 

“Toph! Toph, I’m being serious! I heard something, and it wasn’t a dream!” Toph was probably fast asleep in her own chambers, unable to hear his desperate calls. Surely someone would hear him, even if it wasn’t Toph. He now resorted to throwing his entire body weight against the blank wall where his door should be. 

Half an hour later he’d accomplished little more than a bruised shoulder and a set of strained vocal cords. The wall stood just as firm as it had before. A breeze rustled his loose-fitting sleepwear, drawing his attention to the opened window behind him. 

It was an option. Not a good one, but a viable one. It made him feel twelve again, when he’d woven his bedsheets into a rope and scaled down his bedroom window. He was thoroughly chastised for it in the morning, but he’d only done it because Azula said she saw a band of ruffians gathered outside the palace the previous night. She claimed to have heard whispers, too: the guards planning a mutiny, and first on their list was to do away with the crown prince. 

It seemed silly now. It clearly bore the hallmarks of Azula’s usual lies, but it had felt so real and urgent back then. It was the same way Zuko felt now. He felt so vulnerable, trapped in his bedroom, pacing the floor waiting for something awful to arrive. 

Zuko had stripped his bed and just begun to fasten his sheets to the bedpost when he stopped. His arms went limp, and the bedsheets fell lamely to the floor. 

“What am I doing?” He muttered, quite aware that no one was around to hear it. 

Several weeks earlier his council had given him a stern warning. Not only had the news broken that Azula had escaped, but now his father had broken out of prison as well. They were afraid to tell Zuko at first. They hadn’t anticipated that he already knew. 

“Azula has escaped as well?” Qin questioned. 

Zuko told them, head bowed in shame, everything he knew. 

“She’s been gone how long??” Hansuke accused. 

Zuko didn’t answer. Nothing he could say would make it better. 

“You knew about Ozai, then?” Hansuke pressed. 

“No! That much is news to me. But, well, I’m not surprised, are you? Azula probably helped him break out.” 

Qin pressed each of his index fingers to his temples. He squeezed in eyes shut tight in contemplation. 

“And it didn’t occur to you that if we had known about Azula’s escape, perhaps we could have prevented your father’s?” 

It had occurred to him, of course, but Zuko didn’t say it. ‘I thought I could handle it’ seemed like a pretty pathetic excuse now. 

“Listen to me. Everything you say or do has the potential to end up on the front cover of a newspaper, do you understand me? Every time you are considering doing something, or  _ not _ doing something, take a moment to imagine it plastered on a newspaper. Is this really how you want the people to see you, My Lord?” Qin implored. 

Qin’s advice was solid, but it was of little use now. Zuko’s reputation was already in tatters now that everyone knew he’d covered up Azula’s escape. Was there anything left to protect? Did it matter now what anyone thought of him? Could the Fire Nation people possibly think any less of him than they already did? These were the questions Zuko asked himself, alone in his bedroom in the middle of the night, with a partially-constructed rope made of bedsheets in hand. Climbing from his third-floor window in order to investigate a loud noise that may or may not have been a figment of his imagination when he was under strict orders to stay put wasn’t the behavior of a well-adjusted leader. 

His advisors, including Toph, all claimed he was being sequestered for his own safety. Azula and Ozai were planning some kind of attack. That much was obvious. Zuko had suspected Azula was brewing some kind of trouble for a while now, and it was as good as confirmed when she’d broken their father out of prison. 

Zuko had no trouble believing that he was in danger. His closest family members had a history of trying to kill him, and now that they had spent the past nine years incarcerated, Zuko could only imagine that their motivation was even stronger now. They probably saw it as reclaiming what was rightfully theirs, and they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot Zuko full of deadly lightning to do it. 

Still, Zuko suspected that wasn’t the only reason he was being held hostage in his own bedroom. The public’s faith in their fire lord was at a record low, and his council likely wanted him out of the way to keep him from inflicting any further damage on himself. Zuko wanted so badly to argue, but after his colossal screw up, it was difficult to make a compelling case.

“Just let us handle it, okay?” Toph begged, when Zuko had asked for the millionth time to be let out. The hurt in her voice was obvious, and she was justified. Zuko should have just trusted his friends enough to ask for the help he needed. 

Zuko wandered to the window, but not to climb out of it. He should just stay here like he was instructed. Even if he made it to the ground in one piece, what then? Would he run around the courtyard, chasing phantom noises like a crazed lunatic? What about when he was unable to re-enter his bedroom afterwards? What about when the guards inevitably spotted the bedsheet rope dangling from his window? He was better off here where he couldn’t screw up anymore than he already had. 

“Zuko!” Shouted a voice from some unspecified location in the darkness below. Not just any voice. 

“Aang?” Zuko shouted in return. He was certainly hearing things now. Of all the people to visit him late at night when the palace was under strict lockdown, Aang was the last he expected. 

Sure enough, Aang emerged into the lantern light just underneath Zuko’s window. Zuko straddled the windowsill, prepared to meet Aang in the courtyard with or without his bedsheet rope to aid him. 

“Wait! I’ll just come to you,” Aang hurried before Zuko could do something stupid, something like jump from a third-story window. Zuko retracted his leg, grateful to not have to leave solid ground after all. 

In several impressive, airbending-propelled leaps, Aang arrived at the window. Zuko pulled him inside, hungry for answers. 

“What are you doing here??” 

“It’s the air nomad village. I saw something when I was flying back.” 

“You saw something? Something like…” 

“An army. Fire Nation, by the looks of it.” 

Zuko didn’t hesitate to spring into action, but he required some assistance first. 

“We need to warn your council! Where’s Toph? We need bodies in airships, now!” Aang demanded. 

“I know!” He whirled around to face the blank wall. “You’re going to have to earthbend us out of here. Toph sealed the entrance.” 

Aang gave him a wary look. “That bad, huh?” 

Zuko exhaled. “Yeah. That bad.” 

\-------

“She’s in here. She’ll know where to find the others. You guys go,” Zuko announced when they reached Toph’s bed chamber. 

“Where are you going?” Aang asked.

“There’s something I need to do.” 

Aang said nothing, but the deep frown etched on his face told Zuko that this was not the time for personal errands. Zuko paid him no mind. After all, this wasn’t a personal errand. 

He rounded the corner just in time to catch a glimpse of a disheveled Toph opening her door. 

\-------

“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Qin scolded, like he was Zuko’s freaking mother.

“Something happened.” 

“No it didn’t. You’ve imagined it. Go to bed.”

He shut the door in Zuko’s face, at least, he would have, if Zuko hadn’t jammed his foot in the way.

“Aang is here.” 

That got Qin’s attention. 

“The avatar? Why?” 

Zuko didn’t see fit to answer that question. Not yet, anyway. Instead he raised a question of his own. 

“That project we’ve been working on. Realistically, how soon could we deploy it?” 


	15. What Makes a Monster

Twenty-five hours and seventeen minutes, it turned out. That’s how soon Zuko’s and Qin’s secret project could be deployed. Deploying it wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was mitigating his friends’ disquieted reactions. 

“How long have you been working on this?” Aang asked through pursed lips, as squadrons of Zuko’s airships loaded up for the impending battle. 

“If you’re upset with me, then just say that instead,” Zuko retorted. 

Aang hesitated. “Save the air nomads first, then we’ll talk.” 

And save the air nomads he would. If Zuko’s soldiers were shocked by the rapid improvement in airship technology, then they didn’t show it. They were all business. 

Before leaving, Zuko decided to write Kuei, as humiliating as it was. The Earth Kingdom had nearly ten years to catch up on Fire Nation airship technology, and they hadn’t squandered it. Zuko knew Kuei had a decent fleet, and it was much closer to the remote little air nomad village than the Fire Nation archipelago. Zuko planned on being there as quickly as the laws of physics would allow, but in the event that it still wasn’t quick enough, at least Kuei might make it in time. 

And so they went. It wasn’t very hard to spot the invaders. Zuko had been concerned, seeing as the landscape was so rugged and vast, but it turns out that his father and Azula weren’t even trying to be subtle. They followed the smog trail coming from their war machines first. As they drew closer they could see masses of red uniformed troops marching through the mountains in unison, their banners waving high in the air. 

Zuko knew his father still had underground supporters. He just hadn’t known there were quite so many, or that they had these kinds of resources. 

As it turned out, Zuko had been worried for nothing. Kuei’s forces cut them off on the North side, and Zuko’s troops attacked from the South. It shouldn’t have been surprising. It was just a civilian militia, after all. Even though many of them had served during the war, they were nearly a decade out of practice. Many had been Ozai’s favorite officers, promoted through nepotism, and so they were fairly useless in a combat situation. Up close, Zuko could see that most of their equipment was army surplus, or else discarded because it was defective in some way. Their war machines looked cobbled together by repurposed spare parts. Perhaps they’d salvaged them from a junkyard. Sure, there was a bit of confusion with two sets of red-clad troops attacking each other, but they sorted it out. They never even made it within view of the air nomad village. 

“What would you like to do with the insurgents?” Someone in close range inquired, and Zuko realized the question was directed at him. 

It was General How, dragging behind him a chained Ozai and a sedated Azula. At least he hoped Azula was only sedated. 

“Is she…?” 

“Alive,” How confirmed. “But unconscious. If you intend to transport her to the Fire Nation, you’ll need another dose of those tranquilizers.” 

Zuko said nothing. His gaze drifted instead to his father, who was not only conscious, but glaring at him with startling lucidity. They stared at each other like that, issuing some kind of challenge, or perhaps searching each other’s eyes for something. Whatever it was, neither of them was going to find it. They both knew that, deep down. 

“I’ll keep them in Fire Nation custody. They’ll answer for their crimes there,” Zuko decided aloud. 

How began to walk away, but hesitated, adding, “whatever security measures you were taking before their escape will need to be drastically increased.” 

“Yeah, I figured that out, thanks,” Zuko snapped.

Zuko glowered at him. People tended to crumble under Zuko’s glower, but not How. 

“This  _ cannot _ happen again. Do you understand me?”

For fuck’s sake, had Zuko sunk so low that Earth Kingdom generals were giving him orders now? But what was he supposed to say? His father’s and Azula’s escape had consequences that extended far beyond Zuko’s wounded pride. 

Several meters away, Azula and Ozai were being loaded into the brig. Ozai caught Zuko’s eye one last time before his head was pushed into the ship and out of sight. 

The entire ride home, Zuko couldn’t shake the feeling that he was sharing a cage with a dangerous wild animal. 

\---------

“I don’t like it. Even with the added security. It’s not enough,” Chief Hakoda muttered, stroking his beard pensively. 

Ten years earlier, when the war came to a close, Aang saw fit to create a new council. The International Peacekeeping Council, he’d dubbed it. It was a small but powerful organization, comprising major leaders from all around the world: King Kuei, Chiefs Arnook and Hakoda, Zuko, and lastly, Aang himself. Back then, since the war was won, there really wasn’t any need for such an organization, but it was a nice gesture. Aang was good at that sort of thing. Nice gestures. Zuko wasn’t, so he just went along with whatever Aang decided was best. 

Now, two escaped Fire Nation royals-turned-insurgents later, there was suddenly a pressing need for the council. 

“It’s not just ‘added security.’ This level of security didn’t even exist prior to this conversation. We had to invent it, just for this!” Zuko protested. Seriously, what else was he supposed to do? At this rate, his father and Azula would quite literally never see sunlight ever again. The council had decided windows were too risky. Taking them outside, even under strict supervision, was out of the question.

“I agree with Chief Hakoda,” Arnook spoke up. Zuko rolled his eyes.  _ Of course you do. _ Arnook continued, “It’s not enough. No level of manmade security on this earthly plane could ever be enough, not after what they’ve done.” 

Zuko scoffed. Actually, he’d laughed, but he’d tried to pass it off as a scoff, since that option seemed the least rude of the two. 

“So, what, we should have the spirits guard them?” 

Arnook didn’t show even the slightest inclination of humor. “Actually, yes.”

“How—?!” Zuko started, only to be interrupted by Hakoda. 

“Ten years ago, Avatar Aang spared Ozai’s life on the day of Sozin’s Comet. It was a noble gesture, the kind of heroic tale that will be retold for generations, but now look at the predicament it’s placed us in. It’s just not sustainable, not if we truly want peace.” 

_ A noble gesture. _ Yeah, well, Aang had a knack for gestures. Zuko took a moment to wrap his mind around what Hakoda was proposing. Truthfully, the idea had occurred to him. Zuko was prepared for his father to die all those years ago when he offered to teach Aang firebending, but somehow the idea seemed more real now. It was also more senseless. Why should they kill a man who had already lost everything? 

For the first time since the meeting began, Kuei made his voice heard. “He’s too dangerous. He’s had ten years to reflect on his crimes, and clearly he has accomplished nothing. He’s still the same unhinged maniac he was back then.” 

“So he hasn’t spent his time in prison getting closer with Agni. Now he has to die for it?” Zuko demanded. 

Nobody spoke. They all took turns making furtive eye contact with each other, like they were all in on some secret that no one had bothered to tell Zuko. They all seemed to be daring each other to be the first to break the silence. 

“Aang?” Zuko implored, filling the empty space since no one else would. “You’re okay with this? After everything you did to save him?” 

Aang averted his gaze. “I think we should put it to a vote. The collective wisdom of the council will make the right choice, and I urge everyone to remind themselves that Ozai is only human, not a monster.” 

“The worst monsters are human,” Arnook spat decisively. “I vote to rid this earth of him.” 

\-------

Former Fire Lord Ozai was going to die. There had been a bit more chatter before the official vote was conducted, but when those in favor of taking Ozai’s life raised their hands, Zuko and Aang had been the only councilmembers to keep their hands pressed firmly to the table. Not that it mattered. Two out of five wasn’t enough. 

Azula would be spared, at least. It wasn’t hard to convince the council that Azula was crazy, and from there it wasn’t much of a logical jump to argue that she shouldn’t die for what she can’t control. Zuko considered making a similar argument on behalf of his father, but those hateful, lucid eyes stared back at him every time he tried. Those weren’t the eyes of someone out of control. Ozai knew exactly what he was doing. 

The council granted Zuko the power to decide where, when, and how it would happen. Within reason, that is. He couldn’t delay for very long, and it seemed futile to try. The best he could do was make sure that Ozai’s death would be swift, painless, and private. Zuko didn’t want to make a spectacle of it. 

Somehow, organizing his own father’s execution was only the beginning of Zuko’s to-do list. Once the council resolved the question of Ozai’s fate, they immediately turned on Zuko for his sloppy leadership. 

“Now that that’s settled, can we talk about Fire Lord Zuko’s fancy new airships?” Kuei quipped. 

“Or your troops’ upgraded weapons?” Hakoda added, facing Zuko now. 

“The way I remember it, the treaty forbids you from making upgrades to your arsenal!” Arnook accused. 

Zuko attempted a rebuttal, something about how he’d used his weapons for good by saving the air nomads, but the council wouldn’t listen. All they cared about was the treaty. Treaty treaty treaty. 

The treaty was all the rest of the world cared about too. Zuko realized now it was foolish to think he could come out on the other side of this battle as a hero, but he’d expected some kind of neutral recognition for his role in saving the air nomads. At the very least, he would have appreciated an acknowledgement that Ozai and Azula were the real bad guys here. 

Of course no such acknowledgement came, and when Zuko returned to the Caldera after his meeting with the council, he found he was at the center of an international uproar. Protestors thronged the palace, and when Zuko took a moment to listen to their outcries, he found that they weren’t protesting Azula, or Ozai, or the death sentence he’d received, they were protesting  _ him. _

“My Lord?” Minister Qin descended upon Zuko’s office, not long after his arrival. 

“Come in,” Zuko said wearily. “The optics didn’t turn out the way we wanted.” 

“I know,” Qin said. He looked as bad as Zuko felt. His beard stuck out in irregular spikes, and his eyes looked bloodshot and tired. “They’re calling for my removal,” Qin prodded.

“I know,” Zuko admitted. He did know. It was one of the many demands of the protestors, and then there were the several dozen handwritten civilian letters he’d received. They’d come from everywhere, within the Fire Nation and outside it. Several newspapers cited Kuei and Arnook as having supported the idea. 

Qin sat politely across from him, spine rigid with attention. The question he didn’t dare ask echoed loud in Zuko’s head. 

Zuko said finally, “we rolled the dice, my friend, and we lost.” 

Qin nodded. He understood, and his face strained with the suppressed emotion of it. 

“I will pack my belongings immediately. I vow to be gone by sun-up tomorrow morning. It was my honor to serve you.” 

_ No it wasn’t,  _ Zuko thought guiltily. It wasn’t fair. Zuko had struggled with Qin for the first ten years of his reign and now, just when they were beginning to understand each other, Zuko had to get rid of him. 

Maybe Zuko could have saved him. Maybe Zuko should have saved him. Oh well. It wouldn’t be the first significant blunder Zuko had made lately. He could make up for it somehow, but it would have to be later, once the dust settled. Right now Zuko had trouble thinking more than five minutes into the future. He didn’t know what he was going to do. 

The next morning, Qin was gone, as promised. So was Minister Hansuke, who resigned in solidarity with Qin. 

Zuko was alone. 


	16. Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The earth king's star employee has had enough.

Today was the one thousand five hundred and sixty-sixth day of Renshu’s job in his current position, not counting his days off, of course. Before that he worked three hundred and ninety-one days in his position prior to his current one. Before that he worked a brief stint of eighty-three days in an intermediate position, and before that he worked three hundred and twelve days in that entry-level job that King Kuei had offered him all those years ago. 

He should be proud, right? He’d nobly sacrificed two thousand three hundred and fifty-two days of his life in service to the Earth Kingdom government, and what quality service it had been. Renshu’s propensity for numbers served him well in the financial division. He clocked in early and clocked out late. Sure, he may not be Dai Li (something his family teased him about endlessly), but his work offered value to the Earth King. He’d saved King Kuei from more than one petty bureaucrat skimming the surface of the national treasury. He’d identified cheaper and more efficient ways to do the work that was already being done. He’d meticulously counted every last copper piece and personally ensured that each was allocated where it was needed most. 

He was a  _ good _ employee. A really good one. So he really should be proud, it’s just that—

“Renny, my boy. How’s it going?” Minister Trai crowed. It was far too early for his jovial tone, even though he was nearly an hour late. 

“Don’t call me Renny,” Renshu quipped, eyes still glued to the scroll in front of him. 

“Irritable today, are we?” Trai jeered, placing a hand on Renshu’s shoulder. Renshu elbowed him away. 

“Leave me alone, will you? I’m working on that quarterly report. Your quarterly report, might I add.”

“Right, right. Drop that by my office when you’re done, will you? I need to sign it before I deliver it to the grand secretariat.”

“Yeah, will do.”  _ Funny how my signature won’t be anywhere on it,  _ Renshu seethed. Aunt Rika and King Kuei had to know that Renshu was the one doing all the work, didn’t they? Surely they could see through Trai’s  act.

_ Just keep doing good work and someone will notice, _ Renshu reminded himself for the hundredth time that week.  _ Just put in the time and you will be rewarded. _ These mantras were starting to feel a bit stale. 

Trai crossed over into his office and shut the door. Only the spirits knew what he actually did in there. Today he’d been carrying with him a cloth bundle of something fragrant. Probably sweet buns, and fresh from the bakery by the smell of it. That’s probably why he was late. 

Whatever. Renshu bullied his brain back to the numbers. He liked numbers. Numbers were straightforward. They were honest. They didn’t take credit for others’ work, or pass up their subordinates for promotion for completely incomprehensible reasons. Numbers just were. One was one, two was two, and neither of them was three, not unless you added them together. Numbers told the truth. There were no secrets among numbers. Renshu wished his colleagues could be a bit more like numbers. 

“Deputy Minister?” A voice derailed his train of thought. It was Aunt Rika. 

“Aun—I mean, ah, Grand Secretariat,” Renshu acknowledged. Aunt Rika was friendly enough when she visited home, but at work she had no patience for familial tenderness. Maybe that’s why she climbed as high as she did. She checked her emotions at the door every morning before she came into work. 

She gave him a tiny smile. It was hardly a smile, really. More like the echo of one. 

“His Majesty requires your presence.” 

“Yes, of course! Right away,” Renshu scrambled to roll up the scroll and cap the ink bottle he’d been using to write. He didn’t even bother to replace his quill on its stand. Aunt Rika hovered at the door, neither patient nor impatient. 

He followed her through the halls, which became increasingly decorated and grandiose as they approached King Kuei’s throne room. Renshu scarcely visited this part of the palace. Every time he did, he found that his little workstation felt especially shabby when he returned. The guards stationed at either side earthbent the heavy doors open. Inside was Kuei, seated in his throne and bathed in eerie green light. 

Aunt Rika didn’t follow him inside. Whatever this was, it was just between him and the king, apparently. Renshu knelt on the floor, a respectful distance from the throne. He pressed his nose against the cold stone floor and awaited further instructions. 

“Be at ease, Deputy,” said the king. Renshu lifted his head and sat back on his heels. 

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Renshu replied dutifully, hoping the king would hear his unasked question in the words. 

“As you may know, Minister Trai submitted his employee performance reviews not too long ago,” King Kuei began. Yes, Renshu did know that. What he didn’t know was why his in particular earned him an audience with the earth king. 

That was bad, right? Nothing good could come from having been plucked from his dingy little desk and shoved into the earth king’s presence after a recent performance review. Renshu didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He might as well start packing now. 

Once the initial shock faded, Renshu allowed himself to feel the rage that had been building for the past two thousand three hundred and fifty-two days. The audacity of Minister Trai to give him a negative review, especially after everything Renshu had done for him! Fine. The bastard could write his own quarterly financials for once. He could balance the treasury on his own too. Renshu won’t have been gone a week when the financial division will plummet. Oh, and King Kuei will notice. He might even realize where he went wrong. That slimy, credit-stealing, lying, self-serving, little— 

“He spoke quite highly of you. Your review was leagues above those of your peers. Color me impressed.” 

Renshu’s inner monologue was silenced at once. 

“Really, Your Majesty?” 

King Kuei threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, yes! In fact, I think it’s time you were given proper credit for all that you have achieved around here.” 

“… Thank you,” Renshu hesitated. 

Was this really it? The moment that Renshu had waited for since the dawn of his career? If he were being promoted, then, well, there was only one place for him to go. He was the  _ deputy _ minister of finance, after all. The only position above his was minister of finance. A small difference to his title, yes, but what a world of difference it would make in his daily life. He would have a deputy of his own to review drab paperwork, and he would finally be permitted to sit on the royal council. He could attend their meetings and advocate for the budget directly to King Kuei himself. He could finally utilize his mathematical prowess to its fullest extent. There would be no more waiting for someone to notice all his hard work. 

What of Minister Trai, then? Was he being demoted? Or perhaps he was making a lateral move. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Renshu would finally get credit where credit was due. 

“Hao, Fa,” King Kuei addressed two servants who stood at the back of the room. Renshu hadn’t even noticed them until now. “Please bring forward the medal.” 

Medal...? 

Wordlessly the servants hurried to where Renshu knelt, the two of them using their combined strength to lift a wooden box that looked light enough for one of them to carry alone. They opened it before Renshu’s eyes and presented him with its contents. Inside the unnecessarily oversized box was a polished bronze medal with an inscription that Renshu could just make out in the dim emerald light. He traced the engraved characters with his finger. 

_ Employee of the Month. _

“Well?” King Kuei inquired. He’d settled into a more relaxed position now, slightly shifted to one side of the throne. Renshu could tell he’d crossed one leg over the other under his robes. 

Employee of the fucking month. So much for minister of finance. 

“I’m… deeply honored, Your Majesty,” Renshu managed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the medal. The stupid fancy box, the fact it took two servants to lug it over to him, the shiny engraved medal, and all for what? Employee of the month? Renshu only hoped that King Kuei mistook his reaction for awe. 

King Kuei emitted a delighted chuckle. “Very good! I thought you might be. I want you to know how much I appreciate all that you do, Deputy. I’ll let you run along now. I know you have plenty of work to be doing.” 

Renshu returned to Minister Trai flirting with one of the lower ranking security officers instead of working. He pushed past them, angrily collecting the few belongings he’d brought in that day. He didn’t bother with subtlety; loudly crinkling papers and slamming books on the desk. Even Trai had the wherewithal to stop what he was doing and notice. 

“What are you doing? Are you going home?” 

“I’m sick,” Renshu snarled with such venom that Trai didn’t dare question him. 

“Alright. Um. Feel better?” Trai spluttered weakly. 

Renshu again pushed past him on the way out. It wasn’t until Renshu was already running down the front steps of the palace that he realized he didn’t even know where he was going. He couldn’t go home. It was Liling’s day off, and he wasn’t in any mood to have his whereabouts questioned. 

He ended up at the monorail station, unable to coerce himself onto any of the outbound lines. He found a vacant bench and sat, preparing himself to spend the entire day there if necessary. It wasn’t like there was any shortage of entertainment. Children tossed around an earthball to his left. An older couple shared a clamorous argument over whether their purchases from the day’s shopping trip had been money well spent. Vendors lined the hall to his right, touting to no one in particular the merits of their wares. 

“Hot tea! Get your hot tea right here! We have jasmine, ginseng, and pu-erh!” 

“Fresh orchids! We have every color you could imagine! Buy one for the special lady or gent in your life!” 

“Extra extra! The latest news just in! Hear the latest on Fire Lord Zuko’s council in crisis!” 

Oh, monkey feathers. Renshu might as well buy something to read if he was going to be here all day. 

He meandered over to the news vendor, who was facing opposite him to shout at the crowd waiting for the latest train. 

“Excuse me? I’ll take a newspaper.” 

The vendor whirled around. 

“Great! Three copper pieces, please.” 

Three copper pieces. All Renshu’s hard work and inflation was still at a record high. He sighed, rifling around in his robes for his coin purse. 

Cold realization trickled down the back of his neck as he realized he’d forgotten to pack his coin purse in his haste. It was still crammed in his desk drawer at work. All his fingers could locate in his pockets was the stupid medal. He withdrew it and frowned at his distorted reflection in the gleaming surface.  _ Employee of the Month _ was scrawled across reflection-Renshu’s forehead. 

“Um… would you accept this instead?” Renshu passed the medal to the vendor. The vendor took it, inspected it, bit down on it to test the density, and looked back at Renshu. 

“Is this real bronze?” 

Renshu shrugged. “I think so.” Kuei had spared no expense in humiliating him, so it probably was. 

The vendor shrugged in return and tossed him the newspaper. “Alright then. Here’s your paper.” 

Renshu returned to his still-vacant bench and unfurled the pages. Perhaps reading about Fire Lord Zuko’s circus of a government would take his mind off his own pathetic life. 

_ Fire Nation Minister of Finance Hansuke Resigns Following International Arms Crisis.  _

Intrigued, Renshu read on. 

_ In a crushing blow to Fire Lord Zuko’s already-incomplete royal council, Minister of Finance Hansuke resigns in solidarity with former Minister of War Qin. Former Minister Qin was ousted following the international arms crisis that came to light after disgraced royal family members Ozai and Azula, Fire Lord Zuko’s father and sister respectively, attacked the recently-discovered air nomad village… _

There were still several more columns worth of the article left, but Renshu didn’t care. In fact, it gave him a lot to think about. Fire Lord Zuko had two vacancies on his council, and here Renshu wasted his time praying that Earth King Kuei had just one. What if… 

Renshu ended up in his bedroom packing a bag, though he couldn’t say he remembered the details all that clearly. He knew the commute so well by now that he didn’t need to think about it. The most salient detail was that he found the house pleasantly empty when he arrived. Liling must have been out running errands or something. Renshu didn’t realize she’d returned until she was already standing at the door. 

“Are you packing a bag? Where are you going?” 

Renshu tested the words in his head one last time, just to make sure they sounded right when he said them out loud. They did. 

“The Fire Nation.” 


	17. A Tale of Two Letters

Just when Jian thought her life couldn’t get any more stressful, she learned that the only thing worse than a ticking clock was a clock that  _ wasn’t _ ticking.

“You can’t do this! We have a deal!” Jian shrieked at her mother. She’d been doing a lot of shrieking lately: at herself for not being more hirable, or perhaps for having the foolish ambition to think she could ever have done this in the first place, at potential employers who told her they couldn’t hire her because the entry level position she was interviewing for required at least two years of experience, and the only way to get experience was to work an entry level position… But anyway. She hadn’t shrieked at her mother, not until now, that is. 

“We  _ had _ a deal, Jianling. But things are different now. I don’t like this any more than you do.” 

Things were different, now that her mother was without a job. Her income was never much, but it was enough. They both had been optimistic that their financial situation would get better in the next year after Jian got a job too. Instead things just got worse. 

Only a fraction of the way through Jian’s trial year, Jian’s mother received the devastating news that she was being let go. It wasn’t only her, either. Her entire team was being let go. That was the extent of the layoffs, for now, but it was likely that the whole company would fail in a matter of months. It wasn’t personal, and there was nothing she could do to change their minds. The funding simply didn’t exist. 

Jian’s mother was a weaver who had long since been recognized for the intricacy of her beautiful patterns. There was a steady demand for high-end fabrics in the Caldera at the time when she was hired. There still was, in fact. The local nobility needed to get their flashy wardrobes somewhere, and Jian’s mother was their first stop. From there, they would take the luxurious fabric to a tailor, and then they could flaunt their expensive garments at parties in the ballroom of the royal palace, or, you know, wherever nobility liked to spend their time. Neither Jian nor her mother particularly cared where the fabric went after it left her possession, as long as the income was enough to keep food on their table. And it always had been, until now. 

The company nearly failed after the war, or, so Jian was told. She was too young to remember the details back then. At that time, the head of the company was a woman named Intira. Jian’s mother had met her on several occasions, and described her as old, but not at all frail. She had hair the color of steel, and a steely temperament to match. She had been a naval officer in her youth, and now in her older age, ran the company efficiently and competently. She was good at what she did, and people noticed. People like Fire Lord Ozai. 

Back then there was no airforce. Airships were too new, and the draft had already bled the nation dry of all its able-bodied young people. Every enlisted person still breathing was already accounted for somewhere else. And yet, Fire Lord Ozai had built a fleet of airships to invade the Earth Kingdom on the day of Sozin’s Comet, and someone had to fly the things. So, people like Intira were plucked from retirement and made to dust off their old uniforms. 

Intira had been part of Ozai’s personal fleet. She had been behind the wheel of the most technologically-advanced airship of its day when Ozai faced off against the avatar. She must’ve witnessed their legendary battle firsthand. If she had lived to tell the tale, she would have told her children and grandchildren about the avatar’s unfathomable power. But she didn’t live to tell the tale, and so the company was passed down to her eldest son, Hao. Hao, according to local gossip, was a useless bag of hot air. 

Jian’s mother could corroborate this, as he nearly ran the company into the ground. He would have, too, if not for the intervention of some savvy Earth Kingdom investors. Very few Calderans were pleased with the way the war ended. Most called Fire Lord Zuko a usurper for stealing his father’s throne, or else a coward for surrendering. (There were also some more colorful names that Jian’s mother refused to repeat for her). But Jian’s mother was among the few who was grateful for Fire Lord Zuko’s decision. Fire Lord Ozai’s warhawkishness had killed Intira, and with her, nearly killed Jian’s mother’s career. But Fire Lord Zuko brought peace, and peace brought hungry Earth Kingdom capitalists. Hao was still in charge, at least in theory, but everyone knew that he didn’t really pull the strings. A conference room full of green-clad investors an ocean away did that for him. 

But now, nearly ten years later than everyone else, it was Jian’s mother’s turn to curse Fire Lord Zuko. If he hadn’t been so reckless as to build a secret arsenal of treaty-violating weapons, maybe Jian’s mother would still have a job right now, and Jian would still have a chance to escape her miserable future as a housewife. The international scandal that ensued had scared away the company’s foreign investors, and with it, their money. Hao was broke and entirely unfit to run the company by himself, and so commenced the layoffs. Jian’s mother found herself out of work, and Jian found herself out of luck. 

“Jian, you always knew your chances of finding a job were uncertain. That was fine when I could still support us, but now we can’t afford to take that kind of risk! You need to get married, and soon. It’s the only way,” her mother pleaded. 

“But mom!” 

“This isn’t up for debate. I’m going to pay a visit to Sunstra. I can only pray Genzu will still have you after how unspeakably rude you were that night,” her mother muttered, sifting through the notes she had compiled on potential matches and their families. 

“Genzu is still single? That doesn’t raise any red flags for you?” Jian balked. 

“I’ll have you know Genzu did secure a match, actually!” Her mother countered, and then added sotto voce, “And then she got pregnant… it wasn’t Genzu’s.” 

Jian might have been shocked if this were either the time or the place to discuss the melodramatic ongoings of the nobility. Instead she focused on the unspoken insult. “Oh, great! So I’m not even his first choice either! That’s a great start to a long and happy marriage.” 

“What other choice is there? I stopped looking for matches when we made our deal. Genzu is your only option.” 

“Unless I got a job!” 

“Not this again. How are you going to get a job in a matter of days? Because that’s how desperate our situation has become. Even if you got one, it would have to pay well enough to support both of us, not just you. The stakes have changed, Jianling. You can’t do this.” 

If there was one thing that never failed to make Jian’s blood boil, it was being told what she can’t do. 

“What if I got a job in the royal palace? Huh? What if I replaced War Minister Qin?” She spat. It was completely absurd, and fueled entirely by emotion instead of logic. In her defense, well, she was angry. Really angry. 

Jian’s mother cackled at her. “Yes, well, I suppose that would do the trick, wouldn’t it? I’m not going to hold my breath.” 

She whipped around and took a seat at her desk. She withdrew a page of their nicest stationary, and Jian didn’t have to ask why. She would spend the rest of the evening writing the most groveling, flattering, apologetic, saccharine letter Sunstra would ever receive. Whatever. Jian didn’t have to sit here and take this. Jian’s mother wasn’t the only one who could write a letter. 

When her mother wasn’t looking, Jian swiped a piece of the stationary. She locked herself in her bedroom and put quill to ink. 

_ Dear Fire Lord Zuko… _


End file.
